Web resources for English as second language in Norwegian Schools

WEDNESDAY Oct 9, 2019 17:00-18:30,  Location: Room 803, UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL

How have digitally mediated resources challenged the near-monopoly of textbooks in the English classroom in Norway? How do they represent curricular topics and construct the interaction with the learner?

Dr Sigrid Ørevik from the University of Bergen will discuss the changes in text design and communication with the learner in the gradual shift from paper-based to web based learning resources for teaching English as second language.

Drawing from the fields of multiliteracies, multimodality and systemic functional linguistics, she introduces a framework for analysing learning resources, based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design and Halliday’s linguistics.

The analysis will focus on data from Dr Ørevik’s research attending to two sets of texts from printed coursebooks and web resources used for the subject of English. She will argue that the changes in the media for learning are accompanied by changes in the representation of topics, such as ‘the English-speaking world’, as well as changes to the roles assigned to the users/ learners. The research data will be the basis for a discussion on the participatory text culture described in theories of multimodality and multiliteracies.

Dr Ørevik’s presentation will open the seminar series of the Visual and Multimodal Research Forum for this academic year. It will be preceded by a short tribute to the memory of Professor Gunther Kress, co-director of the Centre for Multimodal Research, who has been the inspiration and driving force behind the Forum over the last ten years.

Dr Sigrid Ørevik is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen, working the field of English Didactics. Her doctoral research investigated published materials for the subject of English in Norway from the perspectives of genre and multimodality. The PhD dissertation, entitled Mapping the text culture of the subject of English: Genres and text types in national exams and published learning materials can be retrieved at https://bora.uib.no/handle/1956/19266). Dr Ørevik’s research interests include English Didactics, genre theory, writing instruction and multimodal texts in English as a second language. She is a member of the research group ‘TELL: Text-based English Language learning’ [https://www.uib.no/en/rg/tell] and of the Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (TeLED) research group: https://www.uib.no/en/rg/teled