Reading for emotion with ICT tools

Too often educational literature constructs the use of digital technology as a communication-mediating device rather than as a tool with qualities that can be utilised for assisting learning. To counter this trend, it is necessary for educators to approach innovation in computer-assisted learning as an opportunity to question how we understand the challenges that the learning process presents to the students and how they can be addressed with the help of digital technology. This paper argues that transformative learning must begin with, and revolve around, a student examining his or her way of relating to the world; this is very different from apprenticeship models, popularised in the 19^th century, that begin with a specific task or practice and train students in its performance. This is a conceptual paper. It describes reading tools especially designed to support first and second language students in developing literacy skills involved in the production of convincing and critically examined texts of all kinds, including public presentations or even poems. The paper demonstrates the relevance of these tools to transformative pedagogies, compares them with other literacy support generally available in schools, and illustrates how they can be integrated into a learning context. The emphasis of emotions draws on evidence from neuroscience, where both comprehension and learning are increasingly presented as emotional processes. It follows that the traditional thinking of texts as products of a cognitive process alone needs re-thinking to account for emotions as the source of intentions which inform both the process of text construction and its interpretation. It is therefore not the vocabulary that students struggle to comprehend or manipulate, but the ways in which emotions are turned into a text to evoke a desired effect in the interlocutors. Furthermore, an explicit attention to emotions allows students to approach literacy and language-learning as a whole person, expanding students' emotional understanding of themselves and how they perceive others.