Materializing the Digital “Letter”: Between Syntagmatic Reading and Multiple, Medial Life

Abstract

This paper addresses the lack of implementation of multimedia literacy in the planning of the Language and Literature curriculum. Its central objective is to determine whether there is resistance to new technologies and their application, or whether the problem lies in infrastructure and lack of training. This makes it possible to identify where the mismatch occurs between teachers’ proposals for written production and reading and the practices in which students actively engage in everyday life.

In order to examine this tension, the paper first analyzes the theoretical assumptions from which it is possible to think about the historical change brought about by the information revolution we are witnessing. This point requires a review of reading in modernity, which entails transformations according to the medium and according to the subjects who use new forms of reading and writing. In addition, a survey is conducted of the productions already available on the web on this subject and aimed at school teaching. Finally, the paper proposes an approach to the results of ICT training courses in the province of Entre Ríos for secondary-school teachers, delimiting the corpus to those participants who teach Language and Literature.

The study confirms that multimedia literacy remains delegitimized and that the active practice of a new form of reading, increasingly widespread among coming generations, has become necessary. In this sense, the paper proposes a new concept of the reader, a new classroom dynamic, and new specific training programs that promote the potential of ICTs to foster reading and writing practices from an updated perspective.

The conclusions of this work address the possibilities that ICTs offer to schools and, in particular, some possible strategies for optimizing reading and writing, adapting production to the current resignification of these practices.