c Libro nº 742 Título: Ananda

Let us have a look at a research group that has developed under this socio-cultural view of reading, which emphasizes the diversity of possible readings and the need to pay attention to the particularities of each practice. Next, we will sum up two case studies carried out by our research group deal-ing with readdeal-ing on the Internet in Spanish, and specifically dealdeal-ing with higher levels of comprehension or critical comprehension – which refers to the ability to interpret the ideology of a written piece (intention, politi-cal tendency, point of view) according to the value that native speakers of the language – also members of the community that produced it – would attribute to it (Cassany 2008). There are some studies on digital reading in L2 from a cognitive perspective (De Ridder 2003), but other studies stress that the comprehension of ideology, text and the diversity of reading contexts or the impact of previous knowledge and reading practices in the mother tongue on the reading in second language are far less common.

Francina Martí (2008) asked three Catalan-speaking secondary school students (13–14 years old) to choose a webpage about drugs to recom-mend to a friend, amongst the three preselected through a Google search:

1) tododrogas.net, a Spanish website by a pharmaceutical association about all types of drugs and with very technical information; 2) ideasrapidas.org, also a Spanish website, deals with varied topics (abortion, divorce, human dignity, AIDS, drugs) and even though it does not acknowledge authorship or sources, seems to come from some religious Catholic group with pros-elytizing motives and religious features, since they relate drugs with human dignity, religion and ‘the Creator’, and 3) gencat.net/salud, an institutional website in Catalan from the Autonomous Government, with topics on youth, including drugs. Therefore, the informants read a website in their mother tongue (Catalan) and two in their environmental language (Span-ish in Catalunya), and they had to choose a website from the three options which had completely dif ferent perspectives: a scientific one, a religious one and a political one. While they were carrying out the task, they read on the screen and chatted, the researcher observed them and took notes and recorded the session; afterwards, the informants were interviewed.

The informants discarded the pharmaceutical webpage because it was too technical, but disagreed on the others: Two of them liked the religious one even though there were no pictures (‘es més difícil llegir-la, però està millor explicada’ [it is more dif ficult to read it but it’s clearer]) the third one was suspicious of the references to religion (‘aquí parla molt de Déu’ [they talk a lot about God here]) and the word ‘the Creator’ (‘eh!, un moment:

El Creador…’ [hey, just a second: the Creator]) because it reminded him of an old man that sometimes waited for the students outside the secondary school, to preach about the end of the world and the return of ‘the Creator’.

In the end, the three informants chose the religious website and only in their final interview with the researcher, forced to justify their choice and to explain why they ignored their suspicions, the boys were made aware of the religious twist in the website and they wanted to change their choice.

Summing up, the study shows that the boys: a) are aware of their infor-mation needs, since they reject technical data (pharmaceutical website); b) notice web design and clarity as a superficial criteria of assessment (religious website), and c) attach meaning to their reading when they can relate it to their world (term ‘the Creator’). But they are not critical readers because:

d) they ignore webpage ideology (intentions, orientation, authorship); e) they cannot interpret linguistic markers that denounce ideology, and f ) they are not able to position the authors of the website in the social order within the community. The reasons for this deficit are more complex and speculative and, in this case, do not seem related to the use of a second lan-guage (Spanish), a fact which is mentioned neither in the interviews nor in the conversation about the reading task: the informants feel comfortable in both languages (Spanish and Catalan). The hypothesis of the researcher refers to the previous reading experiences of the informants, which lacked a critical perspective and also their lack of experience in reading websites of this kind, or fulfilling the task of assessing them and choosing one.

Murillo (2009) presents us with a similar but more complex task involving two French Arts students in their second year, both Spanish language learners since they were seven years old (in other words, very competent: B2/C1). The task consists in gathering trustworthy informa-tion from the Internet about the of ficial languages of Spain for a journalist who needs to write a feature article in French about the issue. Some more

specific questions asked in this task were: how many languages there are in Spain, what they are, how many speakers each of them have, if they are of ficial or they are not in their area of usage and finally, what is a ‘language’

and what is a ‘dialect’? Using these questions, they needed to clarify, for example, whether ‘Castilian’ and ‘Spanish’ are the same language, whether

‘Catalan’ and ‘Valencian’ are the same language, whether ‘Andalusian’ is a language in the same way as the others are, etc. The task is recorded in a Webquest entitled Reportaje Babel: las lenguas de España. Murillo prepared this Webquest, gathered previous questionnaires from the informants about their use of Internet, recorded their conversations while they read, carried out interviews with each of them, revised their written reports, observed the development of the task, transcribed all the oral material and analysed the dif ferent sources in a triangulated manner.

There were six webpages chosen for this task;2 1) Three anonymous and controversial opinions in a discussion forum about of ficial languages in Spain; 2) a scientific article from a university teacher in a website about Castilian; 3) The institutional website of PROEL, which defends minor-ity languages; 4) the webpage called Just Landed for foreigners who want to study Spanish in Spain; 5) a blog by Educastur in Asturias for second-ary school teaching, and 6) several documents from El Rincón del Vago, a website of notes, exams, summaries and school work done by students for students. This selection includes dif ferent genres, authors and opinions, precisely because they demonstrate one of the dif ficulties of reading on the web, which incorporates in the same space very diverse texts in terms of origin, intention and content.

2 Links to the websites used: 1) Lenguas oficiales de España: <http://es.answers.yahoo.

com/question/index?qid=20080425040851AAxEyV>; 2) El castellano.org. Javier Cubero ‘España es un concepto plural’: <http://www.elcastellano.org/lenguas.html>;

3) PROEL: <http://www.proel.org/index.php?pagina=lenguas>; 4) Just Landed:

<http://www.justlanded.com/espanol/Espana/Guia-Espana/Idioma/Idiomas>; 5) Blog Educastur: <http://blog.educastur.es/jjcmlyl/2007/05/24/siuacion-actual-de-las-lenguas-de-espana/>; 6) El rincón del vago: <http://html.rincondelvago.com/

dialectos-y-lenguas-de-espana.html>.

In this context, Murillo describes the ideal reader within these param-eters. The ideal reader:

a) Identifies the practice (website, blog, forum), its purpose (to inform, to convince), the author (institutional/private, scientific/legal) and its audience;

b) Locates the discourse in its original socio-cultural context, in other words, distinguishes a personal blog from a scientific article or a Span-ish government ministry from an NGO or an anonymous author;

c) Develops an awareness about the reading process, bearing in mind the aim of the reading process, and reads strategically guided by this aim, noticing what it is understood and ignored, and

d) Builds a personal opinion, combining the dif ferent points of view, the data he or she has read, the personal points of view and the contribu-tions of other readers (friends, colleagues).

Given the good level of Spanish (B2/C1) of the informants and their status as university students (with a higher education and culture), our depart-ing hypothesis would suggest that the students would draw on previous reading behaviour and that they would be able to solve the main issue of the task at hand. However, the general results showed dif ferently – we will only present here a few data:

1. The informants do not incorporate the data from their reading, in other words, they do not integrate in their answers the information provided in the websites, despite being able to understand it without dif ficulty. For example, they believed that Andalusian was a language, but while searching for information about this issue in the webpages suggested and others (such as Wikipedia), they did not find confir-mation for their belief, concluded that ‘these websites were bad’, and continued believing that Andalusian was a variety of Spanish like Catalan or Galician (Murillo 2009: 53):

A2: non, il en parle pas de l’andalous A1: ah oui je te parle de l’autre langue

A2: ça c’est une introduction || il faut trouver combien de gens le parlent || on peut regarder sur Google

A1: gente: andalous: ah Wikipédia!, moi j’aime bien A2: Bon mais c’est PAS DU TOUT SURE, eh?

A1: oui

A2: ah non, Wikipédia tout le monde peut mettre A1: il y a pas

A2: non mais tu vois? ça c’est la pire des merdes A1: on retourne si tu veux

A2: la pire des sources

Similarly, in spite of the fact that some websites contain information about the lack of semantic variation between the words ‘Spanish’ and ‘Castilian’, in their final answer they concluded that: ‘Castilian is the way of speaking in Madrid and Spanish is the way they speak all over Spain’. Something similar happened with the terms ‘language’ and ‘dialect’: after having visited several webpages containing accurate data, they repeated their previous idea that

‘language’ is the language of the state and ‘dialect’ refers to all other ways of using a language, carbon copying probably a French perspective about linguistic diversity. Summing up, the informants kept their attachment to their previous knowledge, to the semantic, pragmatic and social meaning that these words have (language, dialect, Andalusian) in their community, they translate it into Spanish and Spanish communities, and they reject the data provided by the Internet. (This invites further research on informants from other communities, which may have dif ferent previous ideas, in order to check how they react to this type of task and to verify if their attachment to their previous ideas related to their mother tongue and culture prevail.)

2. The informants identified some superficial features in some genres (they distinguish the forum from the blog) and they can identify the author (Ministry, NGO, etc.), but they are not always aware of the consequences of this authorship, and they have significant dif ficul-ties in assigning reliability to each website. In this fragment of their dialogue, the informants compare two websites that they are not sure about, Educastur and Elcastellano.org (Murillo 2009: 56):

A1: Educastur ça a un rapport avec éduquer, non? (laugh) oui ! A2: Qu’est-ce qu’on fait ?

A1: Je ne sais pas

A2: bf f, j’aime bien les deux quand même

A1: on sait même pas qui l’a écrit || non, il n’y a pas de source, quoi ||

une fois en Terminal on a fait ça comment choisir les bons sites A2: C’est un blog quoi

A1: VOILÀ | moi si je veux je peux mettre n’importe quoi […]A2: c’est dif ficile

A1: on a des doutes

A2: moi mon préféré c’est soit celui-là soit point.org A1: Oui

[…]A2: en fait celui-là il est mieux parce qu’il décrit A1: et c’est plus concret/

A2: et l’autre n’est pas ni of ficiel ni rien

Undoubtedly, the informants do not have enough socio-cultural back-ground to understand the websites (their institutions, authors, intentions, etc.), in order to value their quality, and finally, in order to decide if the information they provide is useful. This shows the need for foreign language learning to include information and instruction about main websites and resources that are located in the Internet for each language.

3. The informants do not critically analyse discourse. They do not pay attention to the lexical choices (historical dialect, use of dialect and language in each website, absence of Andalusian) in their statements, and other markers of subjectivity which show the ideology and per-spective of each website. The only linguistic features that attract their attention are orthographic mistakes or informal expressions, such as lo ves?, yo creo, which they interpret as a lack of formality and serious-ness in the website.

Summing up, this study shows that readers with a good level of Spanish have important dif ficulties in understanding some webpages from the Spanish community and in attributing to them the meaning they have and how they are understood in our community. It is not a matter of a lack of linguistic competence, but a lack of pragmatic and socio-cultural competence, as Murillo explains in his two first conclusions:

If the students do not possess the ability to read critically, they will not be able to fully understand the discourse, no matter how good their Spanish is. That is why it is important to pay more attention to critical reading on the Internet in the teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL).

Students find it dif ficult to access a higher level of reading comprehension situation model (according to the theoretical model of comprehension by Kintsch, Rawson 2005) because they lack previous experience or their knowledge is not adequate. On top of that, they tend to put too much trust in the socio-cultural knowledge related to their mother tongue.

All in all, these two case studies show that the dif ficulty in understanding websites in Spanish as a second language or as a foreign language does not depend on the level of linguistic competence of the informants. In both cases, the informants have a good level of Spanish, but they have significant dif ficulties in understanding the intentions of these websites, in interpret-ing in a plausible way the information that they provide, and to complete the task in a satisfactory way. Such dif ficulties seem to derive from a lack of experience in digital reading online and in critical reading, in their capacity to infer discourse ideology (first and second case), or in a lack of knowledge of the socio-cultural aspects of Spanish reality (its languages and their representation of Spanish population in the second case).

Both researchers also confirm the thesis that the reader used his/her previous knowledge and experience in reading in their L1 in order to solve the task in L2 (Bernhardt 2003), but more precisely with negative results.

Teenagers read websites about drugs as if they were reading a textbook, in which – seemingly – all information is neutral and it does not make any sense asking about ‘ideology’ or authorial intention (which are not amongst common questions in school reading practices). On the other case study, readers competent in Spanish as an L2 show their attachment

to sociolinguistic prejudices of their own community and are incapable of constructing a dif ferent meaning from the empirical data provided by the texts that they have read. In both cases, previous knowledge and prac-tice of reading in their mother tongue and in the school environment act as a brake or a dif ficulty in reaching a comprehension closer to the ideal parameters.

All this seems to indicate the need to incorporate to the teaching of foreign language certain aspects about reading practices and the main lit-eracy artefacts used in the community. In order to interpret Spanish texts in the way Spanish people do, SFL learners should know which are the main written artefacts (journals, webpages, institutions) and which af filia-tion they have (public/private, ideological tendencies or social value in the community). On the other hand, the poor results of critical comprehension obtained from the informants suggest the urgent need to incorporate in the languages classroom, reading tasks that deal with the search for ideology.

Only in this way, will learners be able to appropriate these practices in a relevant manner, according to the norms and values of the community.