New literacy, new media, new challenges

The fundamental issue that internet in FL teaching and learning should be used primarily in dedicated multimedia laboratories is increasingly challenged by practitioners. The relentless march towards increased miniaturization in wireless applications (mobile telephones, palmtops, etc.) means that personalized communication devices are becoming widely available to almost all members of society.

Communications technology is both ‘shrinking’ - becoming portable and seamlessly entering everyday devices – as well as becoming all-encompassing and distributed throughout the world. This continues to have a considerable impact on how communities interact. The emergence of new genres, new communicative modes will inevitably follow. There will be a pressing need for teachers to know how to cope with linguistic challenges that transcend familiar standards and norms. Language teachers must raise to the challenge of harnessing the potential of such new devices for their own and their learners’ particular needs (Gee, 1996).

Whereas, in the past, education was usually a matter of unidirectional transfer of information from the teacher to the student (“top down”), we believe that new pedagogical models now need to be explored in order to prepare future citizens for cooperative, collaborative and life-long learning. There is, as yet, little consensus about what these new pedagogical models should encompass. There are notions that students should be trained to learn more autonomously and to gain access to and digest information more independently than has been the case to date, and that the information gained must be converted into accessible knowledge and skills (Cutler, 1996).

New organizational and pedagogical models are called for, including ICT for teacher education (using a learning-by-doing-and-reflecting approach), and dissemination / up-scaling of successful models. According to de Castell and Luke (1986), teachers need to understand and master the new kinds of literacy (scientific, digital, linguistic, and cultural) which are emerging and the demands they place on both language learners and teachers. In addition, an awareness of new types of language forms and genres, and to what extent language acquisition must be complemented by language socialization, is essential.