The following is a Media Literacy research study by Elhoucine Elasmi on the media impact in Morocco.
I. Introduction
Throughout our early childhood, we have been taught to be literate by learning how to write and read words through the process of reciting alphabets; we have been taught the skills required to recognise when and how those alphabets and symbols are put together to form words and sentences.
In today’s world, messages are not just words and symbols, they come in a variety of forms: from Radio, TV, Internet, Cellular Phones….etc. i.e.: we can watch or read news on our Cell-Phones almost at any time and from anywhere. So it is a must for everybody to learn to be literate by another set of symbols: “The Media”. It is a must for all individuals all over the world to learn skills needed to recognise when and how these set of new symbols are put together to form messages.
Statement of the problem
We are bombarded with media messages and many of us do not understand, or misunderstand the meaning of these messages and so cannot distinguish between truth and fantasy. The purpose of this paper is to empower us with some skills to acquire to better deal with media messages, to understand it, evaluate it and produce messages of our own. Teaching students how to create their own messages through the media is appealing to make them creative; teaching students how to deconstruct media messages is a step forward to make of them literate in the 21st century, able to question things and find solutions to their questions.
Structure of the paper
We start our research paper by providing a whole overview of Media Literacy, just to be familiar with this notion. So after making a sort of comparison between being literate in the 20th and 21st century, we have given some definitions of Media Literacy, its skills, and its benefits; then we enriched our first part by explaining and clarifying the core concepts and the key questions of Media literacy.
In the second part we have tried to bring this notion into practice by making a sort of semi-structured interviews with two groups of students. In that sense, we relied on the key questions and core concepts of Media Literacy for the purpose of knowing if our interviewees are able to deconstruct the messages they consume through the Media or not. Generally speaking, in this section we explain the methodology we have taken to do our interviews.
In the third part, we have analysed the data collection, we have classified it and transformed it into charts just to help read and analyse the data.
We end our project by a conclusion in which we have provided a sort of a summary of our findings.
To read the entire study and the results of the research , please go to:
http://mil.unaoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/media-literacy-the-case-of-Morocco-compiled.pdf