The Effect of Teachers` Language of Possibility on the Nurturing of the Students` Multiple literacies

One of the important tasks of the educational system is to adopt appropriate policies to promote multiple literacies in order to improve students’ social welfare. Achieving social welfare requires nurturing citizens who are literate. The development and prosperity of any society without the development of multiple literacies is not possible as a basis; therefore, the strategy of the country’s education system should be focused on promoting the multiple literacies among students. Given that the educational environment is based on cultural, administrative, political, technological, and educational complexities, it is essential for the teacher to understand and direct them in a profound way in their practice and experience in order to be able to act on its assumptions as an active and responsible interventionist in this regard. In the current condition of the country’s educational system, we are witnessing the usual language and speech training of teachers. What can have a profound effect on students is “language of possibility”. This concept has been introduced with features such as ‘uncertainty’, ‘possible states’,’ possible worlds’ and ‘probabilities’ in specialized sources. In the language of possibility words and combinations such as are likely, may, perhaps, etc. are used. Through language of possibility questions are raised that demonstrate the feasibility and can help spread the truth. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of teachers’ language of possibility on the nurturing of primary students (6th grade) multiple literacies. In other words, the use of language of possibility as a central theme in the “education-centered approach”, which is the ultimate goal of the fundamental reform document of education, is that the setting for its use by teachers and students should be one of the goals of education throughout the curriculum, and attempts should be made to apply it in curricula.

The research methodology was quasi-experimental with pre-test and post-test design with control group. All the sixth grade female students of Aliabad Katol (a city in Golestan province) who were enrolled in the academic year of 2018-2019 constitute the statistical population of this study and there were 457 students based on the statistics of Aliabad city education. A sample of 40 students was selected through multi-stage sampling from the all sixth grade female students in Aliabad. For this purpose, from all the primary schools (7 schools), 2 schools (girls’ schools of Qods and Mehr) were randomly selected. In order to prevent the effect of educational interventions for the experimental group in the control group, in the next step it was decided to randomly assign one school to be the experimental group and the other one  to be the control group. Finally, from the experimental group, 20 sixth grade female students were selected randomly as the experimental group, and from the control group, 20 sixth grade female students were randomly selected as the control group. The mean age of the experimental group was 11 years and 6 months, and the mean age of the control group was 11 years and 5 months, with a standard deviation of 1 month.

The use of language of possibility in the experimental group increases the students’ multiple literacy compared to the traditional method in the control group. The social, cultural, and political literacy of the language of possibility-educated students was significantly higher than that of the traditional students, but the difference between the information literacy and media literacy of the students in the two groups was not significant. There was a significant difference between the rate of multiple literacy of students who were educated in social studies with the language of possibility of teachers and students who were trained in traditional speech, and those who were educated in the language of possibility were more likely to have multiple literacy. There is a significant difference between the level of cultural literacy of students who are trained in language of possibility and those who are trained in the usual way. The  language of possibility-educated students were found to be able to have a higher cultural literacy. There is also a significant difference between the level of cultural literacy of students who are trained in language of possibility and those who are trained in the traditional way, and the language of possibility-educated students were able to have a higher social literacy. There is a significant difference between the level of political literacy of students who are trained in language of possibility and those who are trained in the usual way, and the language of possibility-educated students were able to have a higher political literacy. There is not a significant difference between the level of information literacy of students who are trained in language of possibility and those who are trained in the usual way. There is not a significant difference between the level of media literacy of students who are trained in language of possibility and those who are trained in the usual way.

The findings of this study showed that students who were trained in language of possibility were more successful in multiple literacies than the students who were trained in the usual way. In other words, the language of possibility of teachers in teaching has fostered the multiple literacies of sixth grade students. By providing the opportunity for critical pedagogy of language of possibility, the possibility of separate disciplines collapsed and new forms of knowledge were created by the creation of interdisciplinary knowledge. By using language of possibility, teachers developed curriculum in a way that the cultural resources that their students brought to school was accounted so that they thoughtfully acted on their actions. Curriculum development stakeholders, Farhangian University campus centers, initial and in-service teaching for new teachers, and departments on the usefulness of language teaching and the use of language of possibility for academic faculty, teachers and lecturers are required tomake more efforts in this regard.

Authors’ contributions
All authors contributed in producting of the research.
Funding
In the present study, all expenses were borne by the author and he did not have
any sponsors.
Conflicts of interest
The authors declared no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
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