Harry Potter and Its Impact on American Culture

Across the globe youth are growing up with digital and interactive media technologies as an integral part of their lives. This generation of learners, often called the 'Net-Generation, spends a great deal of free time engaging in online literacy-related activities such as instant messaging, gaming, surfing, and publishing on the web. Such media and technology-literate students can pose special challenges for educators who grew up with and value more print-based forms of literacy. However, because these youth often find digital literacy activities to be more engaging than the print-based ones associated with classrooms, it seems important for us, as literacy educators and researchers, to take an in-depth look at some of these media and activities that young people find so engaging. One such activity that warrants a closer look is online fan fiction—that is, fan-authored texts stemming from popular culture and media such as books, music, movies, and video games. While paper-based fan fiction has been around for years (Jenkins, 125), in recent decades, fans have started "meeting" in online spaces to publish, share, and critique each other's texts.

As a longtime fan fiction author, I was fascinated to find other fans publishing or posting their work on the web. As a fan, I spent hours surfing through sites, reading and posting reviews of my favorite fictions.

This article focused a subsection of fanfiction.net that contains approximately 16,000 fictions based on Card Captor Sakura (CCS), an animé (Japanese animation) series popular with children and adolescents in a number of countries. The plot centers on the adventures of a Japanese girl named Sakura Kinomoto. I chose this series because it is not English language-based, and there are ELLs living in the U.S. and other countries writing and reading fictions in this section of the site. While there are countless aspects of fanfiction.net worthy of further exploration, I will focus mainly on the interactive elements of the technology and online community that help ELLs and struggling writers display and build on personal strengths as they affiliate themselves within the fan community. I will also introduce some of the literate practices and community resources that scaffold ELLs' success with writing, and promote their use of various literacy's as they establish and enact their identities through interactions on the site.

Writing Curriculum and Fan fiction

At the middle school level, a key aspect of teaching narrative writing is helping students to develop believable characters, realistic settings, and complex plots (Atwell, 216). A related aspect of fan fiction that I find to be particularly compelling is how fans, of their own accord, choose to engage in these same literacy practices as they rework and extend the original media. For example, young writers create highly complex characters and insert them into the world of CCS, such as one young girl writing in the U.K. who created a younger sibling for Sakura Kinomoto and then posted an intricate genealogy that explains her relationship to other characters. They also dream up new settings to support alternate ...