Computer games and movies - far from stultifying children’s learning - may actually help their literacy skills, according to one academic.
Eve Bearne, who teaches at Cambridge University’s education faculty, told a literacy conference run by Learning and Teaching Scotland in Glasgow last week: “The children of today are being brought up in a text environment very differently from the way I was brought up. They are wired very differently. They come into the classroom with different expectations.”
According to Dr Bearne, children today are more comfortable with multi-modal elements - photographs and writing alongside gesture and movement in the different media they are exposed to, such as comics, magazines, video games and DVDs.
