Understanding multilingual young adults and adolescents' digital literacies in the wilds: Implications for language and literacy classrooms

Abstract

Changes in digital landscapes have complex effects on the meaning-making that they mediate (Thorne et al., 2015). There is a growing interest in examining the daily digital literacy practices of today’s multilingual young adults and adolescents, who are going to become the generation of future global communicators (Kim, 2016). Addressing current scholarship on multilingual digital literacy, this article examines research on digital literacy practices of multilingual young adults and adolescents beyond the classroom. Drawing upon multimodality and translanguaging perspectives that recognize literacy practices as ideological constructions produced within social contexts and across semiotic resources, the article identifies five emerging themes across the research. These themes are: recognizing cultural and linguistic diversity, exploring and constructing multifaceted identities online, leveraging technological affordances for communicating, gaining social support in virtual communities, and developing global citizenship through online intercultural exchanges. This article concludes with implications to support critical multilingualism and multimodality in language and literacy classrooms.