Stone, Paper, Screen: Tracing the Path of Written Expression

Abstract

Writing as a field has undergone radical changes through time, since it evolved in periods of deliberate, long-lasting scribbles in lithic tablets up to the fast, interactive forms of modern digital allowances. This paper poses inquisitive questions about the pedagogical implications of this change which is to be applied to English language teaching and assumes that the replacement of stone with screens demands the incorporation of new and ingenious practices in writing classrooms. Based on historical processes, literacy theories, and existing practices in classrooms, the paper discusses how the use of technologies (collaborative cloud environments, weblogs, social networking sites, multimodal storytelling tools) are transforming the concept of written communication in English language classrooms. These mechanisms enhance the traditional understanding of literacy because it creates creativity, teamwork, reader mindfulness, and critical engagement on digital texts. Using digital writing paves learners with legitimate opportunities to conduct intentional communication and the practical use of the English language in the actual circumstances. At the same time, the research conducts a close analysis of the issues involved in digital writing, including the complications of assessment, the increased cognitive demands created by multitasking and multimodality, the development of learner anxiety, and the unequal access to digital technologies in the long term. Using a classroom-based action-research method, the research proves that stone-to-screen writing tasks can substantially raise the motivation, engagement and multimodal skills of the ESL learners and, therefore, result in more learner autonomy and a more flexible approach to building knowledge. The paper concludes by providing practical solutions to the reconciliation of the traditional writing competency (spelling, organization, and argumentation) and the multimodality of digital texts (constantly changing) so that learners could be able to express ideas fluently using both the traditional compositional practices as well as the digital tools that are often used.