How Does Technology Affect Literacy Development

At Penn State York, there is a variation between students when it comes to their previous writing histories and literacy development. There are a few factors that have affected literacy development of the Penn State York’s English 015 class: the technologies that have impacted their writing, the people who have impacted their writing, and the ability to be multilingual. Each of these factors can affect the literacy development of the individual. Technologies, influential individuals, and being multilingual has an overall positive affect on the literacy development of the people of Penn State York’s English 015 class.

Based on question number eight of the Literacy Collage, technology has overall had a huge impact on the lives of those at Penn

The consensus of the students who answered the statement “Write about someone who was helpful or harmful to your literacy development” reveal that those who have positively impacted the students’ writing were previous English teachers or helpful relatives. The individuals who have had a positive impact on the students’ literacy development have given people a newfound passion for writing, given advice on writing, helped when it came to grammar, helped with sentence structure, etc. Having individuals like the ones who helped the students with the items mentioned above most definitely had an overall positive impact on the literacy development of the students. Some of the teachers enforced grammar on the students in an unpleasant manner but the method worked for A.B. when he says “My ninth grade english teacher was a complete prick when it came to grammar… With that being said I don’t think I would be the writer I am today without his persistence of making my life a living hell.” Other students like Zach Weinstein who said “I have been blessed with some of the best English teachers in the state of Pennsylvania whom assisted me in correcting some of the many flaws my writings have had over the course of the past decade and have encouraged me to continue writing”, he had a great experience with his teacher and still had a positive

Fifteen students answered the question “If you are multilingual, how has this impacted your literacy? How and when do you move between languages?” The languages that are spoken among the multilingual students are Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, Broken English, and Mandarin. One person who has family of German descent states “One of my very first books was a birthday gift from her and it was titled Your First Thousand Words in German. I would say this has positively affected my literacy” (M. Wahl). Those who are multilingual switch between the languages depending on the scenario and use their language to their advantage. “I speak broken English with my parents at home and have to convert back to regular English when I'm in a professional setting. It is not very hard to switch back…” (R. Makor). “I can express myself fully in two languages, with the ability to go back and forth when I need to” (M. Zingman). The two quotes above accurately describes the overall feeling of those who are multilingual, one thing that can be noted is that being multilingual gives the person an advantage over those who are not because they have a variety of methods of communication. The ability to convert between languages and to make inferences based on one language has positive effect of the overall