Producerly Texts: Implications for Language in Education1

The repertoire of skills and experiences learners bring to learning language and literacy is rapidly growing due to widening global television and telecommunications access. One consequence of young people interacting with multimodal media for significant portions of their waking hours is that, where educators once made use of learners’ reading-and-writing-with-print experiences to construct and support learning activities, learners now come to learning with a broader range of electronic and televisual literacy skills in which to frame and upon which to build instruction. This paper examines those features of televisual and electronic texts, especially those features shared and/or hybridised between television and the Internet, and puts forth a working definition of ‘producerly texts’ – akin to Barthes’ ‘writerly’ texts. How we read electronic texts and the implications of this ‘producerly’ activity for language in education is discussed.