Mobile Phones, Arts Integration, and English Language Arts

Background

Regarding ELA educators, Dana Maloney (2017) said, “What we do is not trivial or incidental; it is essential” (ncte.org/blog). What ELA educators do is provide a base for each student’s future ability to inquire, question, reason, synthesize, and then discuss information from multiple points of view. ELA teaches people to give good directions, to read instructions, to understand the difference between fact and fiction, and to make informed decisions about everything from voting in a representative democracy to which cereal might work for both breakfast and dessert.

The Common Core State Standards break ELA into five distinct but interwoven skills: reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language (http://www.corestandards.org/). Each of these skills is essential for engaging in all the nuances of communication. Reading and writing are probably the first things people think of when they recall English classes, but speaking is the ELA skill people use the most and listening may be the thing people need the most. Language, the ability to put texts together in ways appropriate to the domain or context, becomes a key element to creating content in virtual spaces because each site has particular requirements for how language is used. The requirements manifest in modes of communication: sound, image, movement, and sometimes, words. Some sites have limits to the number of characters allowed, while others only permit a certain length of posts. Hashtags and @ signs mean different things in different online spaces. Images dominate. Adapting to new language skills is becoming increasingly important for everyone as technology changes.