Digital Texts for Learning Finnish: Shared Resources and Emerging Practices

Abstract

Recent studies in the field of new literacies have indicated that a remarkable change in the way we access, consume, and produce information has taken place. The boundaries between concepts such as authorship and ownership have become blurred. This paper will deal with using digital texts in teaching reading comprehension on a university-level course with a special focus on Finnish as a second language. Furthermore, the benefits and challenges of teaching L2 reading comprehension in a multimodal learning environment will be discussed. The three main perspectives utilized are meaningfulness, sharing, and adaptivity. The students attending the course described in the paper were advanced university students from various European countries, who studied Finnish as a second language. The study examines the literacy practices that take place when learners of Finnish as a second language engage in reading and writing blogs in a reading comprehension course. The results of this study indicate that sharing, meaningfulness and adaptivity promote learners’ engagement with reading as a social practice and thus support the claim that using blogs represents opportunities to enhance L2 reading comprehension skills.