Digital literacies and language learning

Abstract

This chapter focuses both on how people’s practices of using digital technologies affect the ways they use and learn language, and how people’s practices of using and learning language affect their use of digital technologies. Over the past two decades, researchers interested in digital literacies and language learning have focused on how people’s communicative practices in digital environments challenge many assumptions about language and language learning that dominate most language and literacy classrooms. More recent approaches have also considered the wider social, economic and political aspects of language use online and their implications for language and literacy teaching. This chapter reviews three main issues that scholars of digital literacy have traditionally explored, namely 1) multimodality and heteroglossia, 2) connectivity and interactivity and 3) games and play. It then outlines the concerns that are driving more recent work in this area, namely 1) mobility and materiality, 2) translanguaging and transliteracies and 3) posthumanism and platform capitalism.