Students as Psycholinguists: Enacting Roles as Cultural Explorers and Language Aficionados Through a Pinterest Activity

• In Event: 72.019 - Technology, Language Learning, and Literacy: How Do They Relate?

Abstract

We analyzed the affordances of Pinterest, a public, internet-based social media tool for sharing ideas through visual bookmarks. Although Pinterest has not been studied long as a learning tool, educational researchers (Millian, Margavan, & Littlejohn, 2012) define it as a second generation social-bookmarking tool for self-directed learning. In our case, Pinterest contributed to building a graduate classroom’s learning community, acting as a virtual pinboard that connected the students and teacher to each other and to ideas related to the course. Having access to this Pinterest board, we explored the pins that students posted and found that it allowed them to enact different roles toward course constructs, such as Cultural Explorer and Language Detector, through Pinterest’s multimodal affordances.

Authors

• Alina Pruitt, The University of Texas - Austin

• Kwangok Song, The University of Kansas

• Kyle M. Williams, The University of Texas at Austin

• Diane L. Schallert, The University of Texas - Austin