Digital Literacy and English Language Teaching: Promises, Pitfalls, and Potentials PDF

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Weninger, C. (2020). Digital literacy and English language teaching: Promises, pitfalls and potentials. In Y. Leung (Ed), Selected papers from the twenty-ninth International Symposium on English Teaching. Taipei: English Teachers' Association-ROC. Selected Papers from the Twenty-ninth Internatio...

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Digital Literacy and English Language Teaching: Promises, Pitfalls, and Potentials Csilla Weninger Selected papers from the 29th International Symposium on English Teaching

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Weninger, C. (2020). Digital literacy and English language teaching: Promises, pitfalls and potentials. In Y. Leung (Ed), Selected papers from the twenty-ninth International Symposium on English Teaching. Taipei: English Teachers' Association-ROC.

Selected Papers from the Twenty-ninth International Symposium on English Teaching

Digital Literacy and English Language Teaching: Promises, Pitfalls, and Potentials

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Csilla Weninger Nanyang Technological University National Institute of Education, Singapore [email protected] Digital literacy is often touted by governments, schools, and educators as a key competence in a globally connected world. It is seen as a must-have skill for workers in the knowledge economy as well as a necessary requisite for democratic citizenship. In one way or another, it figures in diverse frameworks for 21st century education that have become influential models for national education systems (e.g., Partnership for 21st century skills). Yet beyond the rhetoric of education policy, exactly what digital literacy is and how it can be taught remains contested and for many teachers, often elusive. This talk offers a critical overview of digital literacy, with particular emphasis on its relevance to English language teaching. The paper identifies three main ‘takes’ on digital literacy, discussing how each approach emphasizes different aspects and has different implications for educational implementation. As a possible way forward, I will offer some suggestions for how digital literacy could be conceptualized and meaningfully implemented in English language teaching and learning, focusing on a holistic view that encompasses critical reading, digital production and a shift in our classroom context. Keywords: digital literacy, critical thinking and viewing, social practice, English language education

INTRODUCTION As I begin to write this paper in August 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging in many parts of the world. I am sitting in my bedroom with my work laptop, at a makeshift ‘home office’ corner, since we have been strongly encouraged by the university to work from home to stem transmission, even though the number of new cases in Singapore has been low for some time now. Later in the day, I will have some meetings via Zoom, and still later in the week I will conduct my Masters course online, as most of my international students have not been able to gain entry to Singapore to start their new semester due to travel restrictions. Along with many others, I now do most of my shopping online, check daily government notifications on dedicated social media channels, and use mobile apps to pay, check into buildings when I do go out and to help trace contacts. This is our new reality: professional and personal lives carried out and managed almost entirely online with the aid of digital technological platforms. This new normal 194

Csilla Weninger was brought on by the virus painfully fast. Practically overnight, all of us have had to entirely rethink and redesign our way of working and living, and in that process, everyone’s digital literacy skills have been put to the test. In a way, the 2020 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief what governments, leading educational organizations and researchers have been saying for some time: Digital literacy skills are a vital part of competencies needed for a century that is and will be characterized by disruptions caused by environmental degradation as well as social, economic and political instability. Digital literacy has figured in practically all major educational frameworks articulating 21st century skills and competencies (e.g., ISTE, 2016; Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2015; World Economic Forum, 2015). You can even get a Digital Literacy Certification from one of the leading online certification providers (Certiport, n.d.). Yet despite such broad agreement about its importance, there is great diversity when it comes to the implementation of educational programs aimed at developing digital literacy. To put it another way, educational efforts to foster digital literacy seem to highlight or give weight to different aspects of what may be considered digital literacy, based on the context of implementation. This was evident in relation to COVID-19: much of public discussion and measures in the education sector have revolved around technological access and know-how; choosing the right platforms and making sure everyone knows how to use them. Questions about how ‘online education’ shapes the nature of teaching and learning, our relationship to our students, and our understanding of our own professional role as teachers, have occupied a more marginal space. To be sure, academics researching and advocating for digital literacy do agree on certain key dimensions encompassed by the term, which builds on decades of work on media literacy, defined as one’s ability to access, evaluate and create media texts as a member of communities or social groups (Buckingham, 2003; Hobbs, 2007, 2011; Weninger, 2019). On the one hand, digital literacy then can be seen as an extension of these competencies into the online realm (Buckingham, 2015). On the other hand, there is a new ‘ethos’ or mindset associated with digital culture that is different from that built around an analog textual order (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007). Additionally, as more recent scholarship has emphasized, we now understand that digital technologies have also brought on new challenges in how information can be used and is being used to disrupt social and political stability and exploited and manipulated for economic gain at the expense of personal freedoms (Hobbs, 2020; Pangrazio & Selwyn, 2019). English teachers, being charged with developing language and increasingly multimodal literacy in their teaching, are well positioned to be involved in the school-based development of digital literacy. However, as I aim to discuss in this paper, the extent of our involvement depends crucially on how digital literacy is defined and understood by those wishing to foster it in schools. Specifically, I review three ‘takes’ on digital literacy that I argue are prominent in public discussions, educational policies and academic research on the subject. My aim in doing so is to highlight how each approach is couched within particular epistemic and political discourses which impact its implementation as educational programs. Most relevantly, each has different implications for English teachers as potential agents in the school-based development of digital literacy.

PERSPECTIVES ON DIGITAL LITERACY EDUCATION The perspectives outlined below will be presented separately but should not be thought of as entirely different. Rather, they represent differential emphases within digital literacy, which nevertheless have implications for English language teaching and learning. The first perspective 195

Digital Literacy and English Language Teaching: Promises, Pitfalls, and Potentials highlights or places emphasis on technological considerations while the second ‘take’ is more concerned with the various risks associated with engagement with digital technology. The third perspective, and the one that will be advocated in this paper, represents a holistic conceptualization that stresses the socio-cultural embeddedness of one’s use of and relationship with digital technology. Digital literacy as ‘tech competence’ This particular understanding conceives of digital literacy as an array of skills, competencies and to some extent attitudes relating to the use and role of technology in society. Importantly, the word literacy here is mainly used as a helpful analogy: just like the ability to read and write is indispensable today in most contexts, so is the ability to use digital software and hardware with ease and efficiency. Digital literacy thus gains legitimacy and authority through its association with traditional literacy (Buckingham, 2015; Lanshear & Knobel, 2007). The analogy goes further: just as cognitivist conceptions of reading and writing view literacy as comprised of discrete skills (e.g., word recognition, decoding, comprehension, spelling, phonics), digital literacy in this perspective can be seen as a bundle of ICT skills such as coding, computational thinking, or facility with social media. In fact, as Pangrazio and colleagues note (Pangrazio, Godhe & Ledesma, 2020), the term digitals skills is increasingly being used in some contexts for precisely such functional ability with digital technological tools. In a tech-skills-focused conceptualization of digital literacy, the educational implications are quite clearly geared toward equipping students with these skills as part of formal education. This was evident when in 2014 the UK government introduced new initiatives to boost the teaching of computing in schools, with a specific focus on coding, making it compulsory for all children aged 5-16 years old. Similar efforts to promote coding started around the same time, for instance the ‘Hour of Code’ campaign launched in 2013 and continuing until today which aims to make basic coding skills accessible to everyone through free online tutorials and yearly special events (Hour of Code, n.d.). Following suit, in 2017, the Singapore Ministry of Education introduced a “Code for fun” enrichment program, made available in all government primary and secondary schools in the country. Similar initiatives have no doubt cropped up in other countries as well and are not restricted to school-age children. Many countries are implementing programs aimed specifically at enhancing the digital (literacy) skills of working adults as well as senior citizens. It is also worth pointing out that often, arguments for digital literacy as ICT skills and competencies are couched within and supported by economic considerations. In other words, digital literacy as the ‘upskilling’ of large segments of society has clear benefits as it is thought to enhance the competitiveness of national economies globally. This line of reasoning is evident for instance in the July 2020 launch of the European Commission’s European Skills Agenda, which aims to help the post-COVID-19 economic recovery process by ensuring that 70% of the EU population acquires basic digital skills within the next five years. As the Commission’s VicePresident Mr. Margaritis Schinas stated, “This unprecedented crisis needs an unprecedented answer. One that will serve us today and for many years to come. […] We already know that skills are what allow people and our economies to thrive. Now, it is time to join hands and unlock a skills revolution, leaving nobody behind.” (European Commission, 1 July, 2020). Public policies and government initiatives aimed primarily at such technological upskilling have been critiqued from multiple vantage points. First, as Buckingham (n.d.) argued, to consider coding as the pinnacle of technological literacy ignores the fact that it is a skill that is likely to be 196

Csilla Weninger fully automated or at least taken offshore in the very near future. Further, the economic gains associated with digital technology have not been reliably established; in fact, a recent OECD analysis confirms that the effects of ICT investments are highly variable across industries, and in fact are shown to reduce labor demand in a number of key sectors (OECD, 2016). Third, scholars and commentators are highly critical of the increasing role global technology firms (e.g., Google, Microsoft) play in shaping national education policies, in effect turning public schooling into a huge market for educational technology products (Williamson, 2017). In all, critiques center around the primarily economic framing of digital literacy as digital skills (Druick, 2016) and their limited educational impact. If digital literacy is conceptualized in this current climate of “skills revolution” as technological know-how, then developing digital literacy in schools primarily falls within the purview of ICT educators. English teachers, whether teaching English as L1 or L2, have relatively little to contribute to this effort, either in L1 or in L2 educational contexts, unless indirectly through the use of educational technologies facilitating literacy and language acquisition. Digital literacy as cyber safety This second take on digital literacy highlights the need for media users to be able to critically assess and evaluate digital media messages, with a special emphasis on online falsehoods, also known as ‘fake news’. Arguments for digital literacy in this sense have become strong in recent years, mainly since allegations of foreign interference in the 2016 US presidential elections via false news reports circulated on social media. The spread of misinformation concerning COVID-19 during the global pandemic of 2020 again highlighted the need for citizens to be discerning of what they view, read and hear online. In light of growing concerns about the prevalence and impact of false reports primarily spread through social media, all major social media companies have recently launched digital/media literacy educational tools in order to raise users’ awareness and to help them to spot misinformation and prevent its spread. Facebook’s Three Questions to Help Stamp out False News (Chang, 2020), Google’s Be Internet Awesome (Mascott, 2019), and Tumblr’s World White What (Tumblr, n.d.) all offer practical tips and activities to help develop users’ critical media literacy skills. This emphasis on fake news can also be seen as part of broader efforts to foster online safety through digital literacy. A more encompassing term that has been used in education is cyber wellness or digital wellness, typically understood as an optimal state of physical and mental health among users of digital technology (Royal et al., 2019). In other words, it has become obvious that the internet poses certain risks to personal health and wellbeing, as well as societal cohesion and democracy and digital literacy is needed to address these risks. This idea has a long history in media literacy where protecting oneself, and especially young people, from harmful media content was a prevalent approach to media education (Buckingham, 2002). In the digital era, it is no longer just advertisements or violence on television that poses a threat; apart from fake news, a myriad of possible scams, privacy breaches (identity fraud), various forms of cyberbullying and harassment, as well as addiction and other mental-health issues present themselves as risks. While some of these clearly have legal implications or require psychological intervention, many of the potential digital dangers in fact can be addressed through digital literacy. English teachers here have much to offer, given that critical reading and viewing is a skill that is a regular part of English language curricula, not just in L1 contexts but also increasingly in contexts where English is taught as a second or foreign language. At the heart of critical reading is the idea that all texts are representations; constructed by authors within particular cultural and political-economic contexts, for specific purposes and using different genres and conventions of 197

Digital Literacy and English Language Teaching: Promises, Pitfalls, and Potentials communication (Hobbs, 2011). Reading therefore should not merely entail extracting information from texts but rather understanding this process of construction. For Renee Hobbs (2017, p. 61), reading a text critically entails the following: • • • • •

Understanding conventions of textual, visual or multimodal communication work Identifying the author, genre, purpose and point of view of a text Comparing and contrasting sources Evaluating the quality and credibility of sources and arguments Understanding one’s own biases

It is not difficult to see how such an approach to reading and viewing texts must be an indispensable part of being digitally literate in the 21st century. Moreover, the dominance of the English-medium internet is nothing new; in 2020, English is still leading among other languages for the highest percentage of web content (25.9%), with Chinese coming in at second place (19.4) and Spanish a distant third (7.9%) (Clement, 2020). In fact, many students now learn English partly through their online engagements with affinity groups (Gee, 2004) where the medium of communication is English: through interactions in online gaming environments, following social media influencers, participating in various interest groups (Thorne & Black, 2007). As English teachers, we cannot ignore these facts but rather need to incorporate into our teaching multimodal digital texts our students encounter daily, as well as teach students how to read such texts critically. There is a growing body of empirical, classroom-based research that has documented how this can be done in the EFL context (e.g., Bigelow, Vanek, King & Abdi, 2017; Chen, 2018; Chun, 2020) which can serve as a model as well as inspiration for our professional practice. Yet an exclusive focus on critical reading can also seem like a rather narrow conceptualization. Notwithstanding the importance of developing critical skills in students to be more discerning of what they read and see online, viewing digital literacy primarily as a tool to combat fake news does not do justice to the complexity of skills and dispositions needed to navigate the digital realm safely, critically and creatively. Additionally, while critical reading is important, so too is an understanding of the political economy of digital media as well as new forms of digital propaganda such as algorithmic personalization (Hobbs, 2020). Critical reading must be supplanted by knowledge of how digital, especially social media are tied to an economy that thrives on emotional manipulation. Finally, important as it is, critical reading and viewing is only one side of the literacy construct, focused on what has traditionally been called receptive skills. Educational approaches to digital literacy should surely address literacy as a complex interplay of receptive and productive skills. Digital literacy as social practice The defining feature of this third take on digital literacy is that it is explicitly grounded in scholarship in literacy. Literacy therefore is not a convenient analogy, as we saw with the first approach but rather a theoretical postulation about what it means to be a competent language user. It rests on an understanding of literacy as “socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006, p. 64) in multiple modes and media, and as members of social groups. Literacy is not simply the ability to read and write but “the sharing of meaning through symbols” (Hobbs, 2017, p. 5), learned and used within communities whose values and beliefs shape their literacy practices. Given this social view of 198

Csilla Weninger meaning-making, literacy also must be understood as deeply historical, political and intertwined with our social identities and place in the world (Street, 1995). While it is easy to see how such a definition can be extended to the digital realm, it is important to recognize that digital spaces have also brought about new ways of being in the world and relating to others. I want to highlight two unique features here, both of ...