Multiliteracies in practice

One thing brought up in the handout by Dr. Bomer is very interesting. He mentions that everyone has a “limited supply of attention” and each individual has to plan where and how to use it. Because of the easy access to information, one is likely to be overwhelmed by all types of information available and be distracted from what he/she really wants to focus on in the first place. Spending too much time on reading unrelated information while searching for the necessary information may be my personal itch. Time fleets away like a flash, and nothing big has accomplished.
My attention span has become so short that I couldn’t focus on one single text at a time. The way the information spread out through the Internet has changed the reading habits of people. In the old times, people do not need to pay effort to focus on one single piece of information since they tend to get access to one thing at a time. When too much information is available, one will need to manage his/her time and attention to screen superfluous information and spot pivotal elements.

In the article “A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures,” the New London Group addresses that the trend of civic pluralism fosters the change of the content of public rights and pedagogical orientation of literacy. Cultural and linguistic diversity was no longer viewed as “abnormal” or “non-standard,” but was valued as powerful social resources for students who may equip themselves for multicultural niche markets in the future. This reminds me of the issue of accent that has been brought up constantly in recent years. When learning a foreign language, most people tend to believe that only when individuals who can speak a language without an accent are good learners or speakers of that language. “Without an accent” here I refer to an accent of a target language influenced by a speaker’s native language. Take English as an international language for example. There are an immense number of people speaking this language and, for those who learn English as a second or foreign language; their native tone would more or less affect their accent. The nonnative accent used to be viewed as a stigma, while in the New World, some people, especially humanity researchers and ethnographers, start to advocate the concept of accent as a representation of personal or ethical identity and idiosyncrasy. However, we need to be cautious that the new concept may fall into the category of tokenistic pluralism and people having nonnative accents still have difficulty in being recognized.