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development we’ve seen.
CL and TM: Your own work is closely associated with the model of digital literacies you developed together with Mark Pegrum and Gavin Dudeney. What has originally caused you to develop this model, and what aspects did you feel needed integrating into current revisions of this model?
NH: Literacy has always been a central concern of formal schooling. In the past literacy included learning how to read and write, numeracy, and media literacies (e.g. looking at traditional media such as TV or newspapers with a critical eye). With the advent of digital technologies and the Internet, it has been apparent for some time that children need to learn additional literacies in order to thrive in our modern hyper-connected and digital world. Hence the focus on digital literacies reflected now in most educational curricula around the world, at primary, secondary and tertiary level.
‘Digital literacies’ is an umbrella term, and as such, it is somewhat vague. Although almost everyone agrees that we need to be digitally literate, exactly what that consists of is less clear, despite the existence of numerous frameworks. Our model of digital literacies is a construct that tries to break down the rather vague term ‘digital literacies’ into smaller and more understandable competences or sub-skills. Our model groups these sub-skills (or ‘literacies’) into four main areas: 1) communication; 2) information; 3) collaboration; and 4) (re)design. We consider these four areas to be the lynchpins in any consideration of digital literacies. Communication because digital technologies allow us to be connected and to communicate both locally and globally, via range of tools and media, as never before. Information because of the vast amounts of information that we can now create and/or find online; and we need a range of digital literacies to be able to access, evaluate, create and understand this digital information. Collaboration because digital technologies allow us to collaborate, to present ourselves, and to learn and work in distributed networks globally. And finally (re)design because since the rise of web 2.0 in the late 1990s, we have been able to produce or design our own digital content, redesign or remix the digital content of others, and to easily share that content across a wide variety of digital channels.
Our model of digital literacies was developed, particularly by Mark Pegrum, in the early 2010s, and the first edition of our book Digital Literacies was published in 2013. A lot has happened technology-wise since then. We have seen the development of new digital technologies and tools such as fitness trackers, or augmented and virtual reality apps and headsets. Each of these new tools allows us to do new things in our personal and professional lives, and they require new digital literacies. For example, understanding and applying the data provided by your fitness tracker requires a certain amount of data literacy. Using virtual and augmented reality requires spatial literacy. There is also an increasing amount of misinformation and disinformation being spread online, which we ourselves may unwittingly share or amplify via our social networks. Navigating one’s way safely and ethically through this ‘information pollution’ (Wardle & Derakhshan 2017) means that ethical and critical digital literacies have become more important than ever. Current revisions of our digital literacies model keep the same four key areas, but we have renamed some literacies (e.g. ‘multimedia’ literacy has become ‘multimodal’ literacy to reflect current scholarship), and we have added others (e.g. data literacy and a range of critical literacies – critical mobile literacy, critical material literacy, critical philosophical literacy, and critical academic literacy). Code literacy now includes an overt focus on technological literacy and robotic/AI literacy to reflect current developments in hardware and software that are likely to become increasingly important in the future.
Although ours is one of several digital literacies models or frameworks currently in existence, what makes it unique is that we focus on language teaching and learning. Our model is quite detailed, with several literacies within each of our four key areas, and we provide concrete activities for teachers and learners that can support the development of specific digital literacies at the same time as developing students’ language skills. Our focus on digital literacies is both theoretical and practical, and our model has been used to inform a number of European language learning initiatives, including the DigiLanguages project funded by the Irish National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (www.digilanguages.ie ), and Swedish pre-service and in-service teacher development programmes (Allen, 2015; Berggren & Allen, 2017). The second edition of our book Digital Literacies (Dudeney, Hockly & Pegrum, forthcoming) will include activities for language learners that help them develop the newer digital literacies in our framework too.
The model of digital literacies by Gavin Dudeney, Nicky Hockly and Mark Pegrum was first published in 2013 in Digital Literacies: Research and Resources in Language Teaching. The revised version is already accessible in the article “Digital Literacies Revisited” The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL (2018, Volume 7, Number 2). Figure 1 shows the revised framework of digital literacies from 2018.
Figure 1: Revised framework of digital literacies 2018. Adapted from the original source: https://markpegrum.com/overview-of-digital-learning/e-learning-with-web-3-0/
CL and TM: Is foreign language learning actually changing fundamentally through the use of digital media? Or is this merely an illusion?
NH: This is an interesting question. Second language acquisition (SLA) research shows us that certain things need to happen for us to learn a foreign language. For example, we need both input and output – that is we need to be exposed to the language, and we also need to produce or practice it. We need a certain amount of language awareness, that is, an understanding of the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation – the ‘nuts and bolts’ – of the language. We need to be motivated and engaged to learn. These things have not changed. However, digital resources arguably enable us to optimise some of these key SLA conditions. For example, we can now get input in the foreign language from a huge range of sources, and in a range of media (written, audio, video, images). We can easily connect with speakers of our target language, and communicate online with them in written and/or spoken form. There are plenty of language learning resources, apps and courses, in a range of languages, that we can access, often for free. So there is no doubt that digital technologies have changed how we access – and even use – language. It has also changed where and when we access learning resources, because the internet provides us with many opportunities for informal and ‘just-in-time’ language learning.
The role of the teacher has also been changed by technology. From frequently being the only source of information for and about the foreign language, the teacher now needs to become a facilitator who can guide students towards online resources, which in some cases can provide better or more relevant language models than the teacher him/herself. I don’t think that the teachers are going to become extinct though. Language is essentially social, and language learning is a social process. Language learning apps and websites, no matter how fancy the interface or media used, only go so far towards satisfying our communication needs. And teachers will continue to be well-placed to facilitate and support those needs in formal learning contexts.
CL and TM: If you could freely design a tool or an app for language learning without any financial or technological restraints, what would it be able to do?
NH: Probably the most difficult thing to mimic with digital technology is the cut and thrust of real human conversation. Chatbots function adequately in very limited domains, in which the conversational prompts are limited and predictable, but they are nowhere near capable of producing the kinds of real-life interactions that humans are capable of. So if I had a completely unlimited budget, I’d love to have an android (a humanoid robot) that could hold a real conversation on a huge range of topics, using all of the typical elements that we see in human speech, such as interruptions, hesitations, rephrasing, and so on. Maybe that will be