English in cyberspace

Abstract

This chapter explores the educational gap between contemporary cyberspace communications that bring youth of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds together in an era of local-global synergies, and resources and approaches used in English language and literacy teaching and testing, and questions the political agenda to gate-keep restrictive literacy attainment which creates unhelpful divisions between L1 and L2 users. The authors raise relevant communicative issues for second language users in this discussion of contemporary digital genres and platforms that are growing in global popularity, such as contending with the shifting orthographic conventions used in digital conversations which at the same time facilitate conversational practice free from the stigma of an identifying “foreign” accent.