TITLE:
Initial Academic Literacies/EAP/Genre Practices: Towards Horizontal and Participatory Online-Offline Learning in a Changing World
AUTHORS:
Nara Hiroko Takaki
KEYWORDS:
Academic Literacies/EAP/Genre, Meaning Making, Horizontal Participation, Transformative Pro-cess
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.2 No.10,
October
27,
2014
ABSTRACT: This article argues in favor of extended possibilities for under-graduate students’ initial development of academic literacies/EAP/genre practices. The description of a particular learner’s initiative and its consequences constitutes the focus of the paper, which is the result of a research project in a specific context of higher education in Brazil. Qualitative and interpretive aspects characterize the methodology adopted for this investigation for the researcher and the participants’ perspectives are considered. It also assumes academic literacy/EAP/genre as situated social practices. The learning theories support the use of Facebook in English language instruction. Portability and multitasking, opportunity to structure learning on personal time and schedule, space for critical authorship and multimodal tasks in collaborative fashion suggest the inseparability between non-dominant forma of literacies and conventional academic literacy/EAP/genre studies.