Reflection of Hirvela's article in Chapter 5

In Hirvela’s article of Chapter 5, she presented several models of reading-writing connections pedagogy. What impresses me is the computer-mediated model. Recently, out of the trend of globalization, there has been an upsurge of English instruction through technologies and the computer-assisted language learning is implemented in the ESL/EFL learning intensively. Many scholars start to investigate how the technologies would enhance or support students’ acquisition of English learning, explain the difficulties and problems, try to search for the potential solutions. Like blog, facebook, youtube, and second life, these studies related to the technologies are discussed gradually.


As Leu (2000) mentioned, teachers and students are forced to adapt to the new notion of electronic literacy (Hirvela, 2007, p 142). In the semester, my instructor employs the blog in one of my course, “Second language literacy”. We post our reflection/journal for each week, and peers are able to response to others. Sometimes, others opinions will inspire me to think from different angles. The asynchronous ways of learning facilitate our reading and writing habits. I cannot ignore that the technology advances my English abilities in reading and writing. However, sometimes, I do not think it is the best way to advance my learning. Although we can read the electronic texts on the internet, I am still accustomed to reading through print texts. When I search for some readable articles from the database or acquire any files, most of time, I print out these articles. I can read them, and take notes around the margin. That is what I should consider which would be the better approaches to advance students’ learning and teachers’ instruction.