Literacy Technologies for emergent bilinguals: Do affordances affect outcomes?

I just gave a talk with my colleague Samantha Daley at the American Psychological Association (title above). We addressed issues of digital technologies, literacy development, and bilingualism in the context of increasing ubiquity of digital affordances, and what that means for instruction in the elementary and middle school grades. We targeted 3 dimensions of affordances that digital technologies provide in the current era:

ACCESS
●Supporting learner to access text content accounting for maximum learner variability (e.g., text-to-speech, speech-to-text)
     ○Potential barriers: e.g., visual impairments, decoding challenges
     ○Leveraging existing capabilities: e.g., alternative modalities
PROCESSING
●Getting the learner to metacognitively process language and literacy to better understand their relation to learning and comprehension (e.g., embedded vocabulary supports or comprehension strategy applications)
     ○Potential barriers: e.g., emergent English proficiency
     ○Leveraging existing knowledge: e.g., native language proficiency
INTERNALIZATION
●Getting the learner to internalize learning, to feel expert and engaged in the content (e.g., motivation, self-efficacy)
     ○Potential barriers: e.g., limited reading proficiency
     ○Leveraging existing knowledge: e.g., high-interests texts 

Our powerpoint is here. The video will be posted soon on the APA website.