Multimodality and modals

My attention was recently drawn (thanks to Grzegorz Śpiewak) to a recent free publication from OUP. It’s called ‘Multimodality in ELT: Communication skills for today’s generation’ (Donaghy et al., 2023) and it’s what OUP likes to call a ‘position paper’: it offers ‘evidence-based recommendations to support educators and learners in their future success’. Its topic is multimodal (or multimedia) literacy, a term used to describe the importance for learners of being able ‘not just to understand but to create multimedia messages, integrating text with images, sounds and video to suit a variety of communicative purposes and reach a range of target audiences’ (Dudeney et al., 2013: 13).

Grzegorz noted the author of this paper’s ‘positively charged, unhedged language to describe what is arguably a most complex problem area’. As an example, he takes the summary of the first section and circles questionable and / or unsubstantiated claims. It’s just one example from a text that reads more like a ‘manifesto’ than a balanced piece of evidence-reporting. The verb ‘need’ (in the sense of ‘must’, as in ‘teachers / learners / students need to …’) appears no less than 57 times. The modal ‘should’ (as in ‘teachers / learners / students should …’) clocks up 27 appearances.

What is it then that we all need to do? Essentially, the argument is that English language teachers need to develop their students’ multimodal literacy by incorporating more multimodal texts and tasks (videos and images) in all their lessons. The main reason for this appears to be that, in today’s digital age, communication is more often multimodal than not (i.e. monomodal written or spoken text). As an addendum, we are told that multimodal classroom practices are a ‘fundamental part of inclusive teaching’ in classes with ‘learners with learning difficulties and disabilities’. In case you thought it was ironic that such an argument would be put forward in a flat monomodal pdf, OUP also offers the same content through a multimodal ‘course’ with text, video and interactive tasks.

It might all be pretty persuasive, if it weren’t so overstated. Here are a few of the complex problem areas.

What exactly is multimodal literacy?

We are told in the paper that there are five modes of communication: linguistic, visual, aural, gestural and spatial. Multimodal literacy consists, apparently, of the ability

• to ‘view’ multimodal texts (noticing the different modes, and, for basic literacy, responding to the text on an emotional level, and, for more advanced literacy, respond to it critically)
• to ‘represent’ ideas and information in a multimodal way (posters, storyboards, memes, etc.)

I find this frustratingly imprecise. First: ‘viewing’. Noticing modes and reacting emotionally to a multimedia artefact do not take anyone very far on the path towards multimodal literacy, even if they are necessary first steps. It is only when we move towards a critical response (understanding the relative significance of different modes and problematizing our initial emotional response) that we can really talk about literacy (see the ‘critical literacy’ of Pegrum et al., 2018). We’re basically talking about critical thinking, a concept as vague and contested as any out there. Responding to a multimedia artefact ‘critically’ can mean more or less anything and everything.

Next: ‘representing’. What is the relative importance of ‘viewing’ and ‘representing’? What kinds of representations (artefacts) are important, and which are not? Presumably, they are not all of equal importance. And, whichever artefact is chosen as the focus, a whole range of technical skills will be needed to produce the artefact in question. So, precisely what kind of representing are we talking about?

Priorities in the ELT classroom

The Oxford authors write that ‘the main focus as English language teachers should obviously be on language’. I take this to mean that the ‘linguistic mode’ of communication should be our priority. This seems reasonable, since it’s hard to imagine any kind of digital literacy without some reading skills preceding it. But, again, the question of relative importance rears its ugly head. The time available for language leaning and teaching is always limited. Time that is devoted to the visual, aural, gestural or spatial modes of communication is time that is not devoted to the linguistic mode.

There are, too, presumably, some language teaching contexts (I’m thinking in particular about some adult, professional contexts) where the teaching of multimodal literacy would be completely inappropriate.

Multimodal literacy is a form of digital literacy. Writers about digital literacies like to say things like ‘digital literacies are as important to language learning as […] reading and writing skills’ or it is ‘crucial for language teaching to […] encompass the digital literacies which are increasingly central to learners’ […] lives’ (Pegrum et al, 2022). The question then arises: how important, in relative terms, are the various digital literacies? Where does multimodal literacy stand?

The Oxford authors summarise their view as follows:

There is a need for a greater presence of images, videos, and other multimodal texts in ELT coursebooks and a greater focus on using them as a starting point for analysis, evaluation, debate, and discussion.

My question to them is: greater than what? Typical contemporary courseware is already a whizzbang multimodal jamboree. There seem to me to be more pressing concerns with most courseware than supplementing it with visuals or clickables.

Evidence

The Oxford authors’ main interest is unquestionably in the use of video. They recommend extensive video viewing outside the classroom and digital story-telling activities inside. I’m fine with that, so long as classroom time isn’t wasted on getting to grips with a particular digital tool (e.g. a video editor, which, a year from now, will have been replaced by another video editor).

I’m fine with this because it involves learners doing meaningful things with language, and there is ample evidence to indicate that a good way to acquire language is to do meaningful things with it. However, I am less than convinced by the authors’ claim that such activities will strengthen ‘active and critical viewing, and effective and creative representing’. My scepticism derives firstly from my unease about the vagueness of the terms ‘viewing’ and ‘representing’, but I have bigger reservations.

There is much debate about the extent to which general critical thinking can be taught. General critical viewing has the same problems. I can apply critical viewing skills to some topics, because I have reasonable domain knowledge. In my case, it’s domain knowledge that activates my critical awareness of rhetorical devices, layout, choice of images and pull-out quotes, multimodal add-ons and so on. But without the domain knowledge, my critical viewing skills are likely to remain uncritical.

Perhaps most importantly of all, there is a lack of reliable research about ‘the extent to which language instructors should prioritize multimodality in the classroom’ (Kessler, 2022: 552). There are those, like the authors of this paper, who advocate for a ‘strong version’ of multimodality. Others go for a ‘weak version’ ‘in which non-linguistic modes should only minimally support or supplement linguistic instruction’ (Kessler, 2022: 552). And there are others who argue that multimodal activities may actually detract from or stifle L2 development (e.g. Manchón, 2017). In the circumstances, all the talk of ‘needs to’ and ‘should’ is more than a little premature.

Assessment

The authors of this Oxford paper rightly note that, if we are to adopt a multimodal approach, ‘it is important that assessment requirements take into account the multimodal nature of contemporary communication’. The trouble is that there are no widely used assessments (to my knowledge) that do this (including Oxford’s own tests). English language reading tests (like the Oxford Test of English) measure the comprehension of flat printed texts, as a proxy for reading skills. This is not the place to question the validity of such reading tests. Suffice to say that ‘little consensus exists as to what [the ability to read another language] entails, how it develops, and how progress in development can be monitored and fostered’ (Koda, 2021).

No doubt there are many people beavering away at trying to figure out how to assess multimodal literacy, but the challenges they face are not negligible. Twenty-first century digital (multimodal) literacy includes such things as knowing how to change the language of an online text to your own (and vice versa), how to bring up subtitles, how to convert written text to speech, how to generate audio scripts. All such skills may well be very valuable in this digital age, and all of them limit the need to learn another language.

Final thoughts

I can’t help but wonder why Oxford University Press should bring out a ‘position paper’ that is so at odds with their own publishing and assessing practices, and so at odds with the paper recently published in their flagship journal, ELT Journal. There must be some serious disconnect between the Marketing Department, which commissions papers such as these, and other departments within the company. Why did they allow such overstatement, when it is well known that many ELT practitioners (i.e. their customers) have the view that ‘linguistically based forms are (and should be) the only legitimate form of literacy’ (Choi & Yi, 2016)? Was it, perhaps, the second part of the title of this paper that appealed to the marketing people (‘Communication Skills for Today’s Generation’) and they just thought that ‘multimodality’ had a cool, contemporary ring to it? Or does the use of ‘multimodality’ help the marketing of courses like Headway and English File with additional multimedia bells and whistles? As I say, I can’t help but wonder.

If you want to find out more, I’d recommend the ELT Journal article, which you can access freely without giving your details to the marketing people.

Finally, it is perhaps time to question the logical connection between the fact that much reading these days is multimodal and the idea that multimodal literacy should be taught in a language classroom. Much reading that takes place online, especially with multimodal texts, could be called ‘hyper reading’, characterised as ‘sort of a brew of skimming and scanning on steroids’ (Baron, 2021: 12). Is this the kind of reading that should be promoted with language learners? Baron (2021) argues that the answer to this question depends on the level of reading skills of the learner. The lower the level, the less beneficial it is likely to be. But for ‘accomplished readers with high levels of prior knowledge about the topic’, hyper-reading may be a valuable approach. For many language learners, monomodal deep reading, which demands ‘slower, time-demanding cognitive and reflective functions’ (Baron, 2021: x – xi) may well be much more conducive to learning.

References

Baron, N. S. (2021) How We Read Now. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Choi, J. & Yi, Y. (2016) Teachers’ Integration of Multimodality into Classroom Practices for English Language Learners’ TESOL Journal, 7 (2): 3-4 – 327

Donaghy, K. (author), Karastathi, S. (consultant), Peachey, N. (consultant), (2023). Multimodality in ELT: Communication skills for today’s generation [PDF]. Oxford University Press. https://elt.oup.com/feature/global/expert/multimodality (registration needed)

Dudeney, G., Hockly, N. & Pegrum, M. (2013) Digital Literacies. Harlow: Pearson Education

Kessler, M. (2022) Multimodality. ELT Journal, 76 (4): 551 – 554

Koda, K. (2021) Assessment of Reading. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0051.pub2

Manchón, R. M. (2017) The Potential Impact of Multimodal Composition on Language Learning. Journal of Second Language Writing, 38: 94 – 95

Pegrum, M., Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. (2018) Digital Literacies Revisited. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 7 (2): 3 – 24

Pegrum, M., Hockly, N. & Dudeney, G. (2022) Digital Literacies 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge

Digital literacies literacy

You could be forgiven for wondering what, precisely, digital literacies are. In the first edition of ‘Digital Literacies’, Dudeney et al. (2013:2) define the term as ‘the individual and social skills needed to effectively interpret, manage, share and create meaning in the growing range of digital communication channels’. This is pretty broad, and would seem to encompass more or less anything that people do with digital technology, including the advanced arts of trolling and scamming. Nine years later, in the new edition of this book (Pegrum et al., 2022:5), the authors modify their definition a little: ‘the individual and social skills needed to effectively manage meaning in an era of digitally networked, often blended, communication’. This is broader still. In the intervening years there has been a massive proliferation of ways of describing specific digital literacies, as well as more frameworks of digital literacies than anyone (bar people writing about the topic) could possibly want. Of course, there is much in common between all these descriptive and taxonomic efforts, but there is also much that differs. What, precisely, ‘digital literacies’ means changes over both time and space. It carries different meanings in Australia, Sweden and Argentina, and, perhaps, it only makes sense to have a local conceptualisation of the term (Pangrazio et al., 2020). By the time you have figured out what these differences are, things will have moved on. Being ‘digitally-literate’ literate is an ongoing task.

What, precisely, ‘digital literacies’ are only really matters when we are told that it is vital to teach them. It’s easy to agree that digital skills are quite handy in this networked world, but, unless we have a very clear idea of what they are, it’s not going to be easy to know which ones to teach or how to teach them. Before we get caught up in the practical pedagogical details, it might be useful to address three big questions:

• How useful it is to talk about digital literacies?
• Can digital literacies be taught?
• Should digital literacies be taught as part of the English language curriculum?

How useful is it to talk about digital literacies?

Let’s take one example of a framework: the Cambridge Life Competencies Framework (CLC). The CLC lists six key competencies (creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, learning to learn, and social responsibilities). Underpinning and informing these six competencies are three ‘foundation layers’: ‘emotional development’, ‘discipline knowledge’ and ‘digital literacy’. Digital literacy is broken down as follows:

It’s a curious amalgam of relatively straightforward skills and much more complex combinations of skills with knowledge, attitudes and dispositions. In the former category (see the first box in the chart above), we would find things like the ability to use tags, hashtags, search engines, and filters. In the latter (see the second box in the chart above), we would find things like the ability to recognise fake news or to understand how and why personally targeted advertising is such a money-spinner.

Another example, this one, from Pegrum et al (2018), is more complex and significantly more detailed. On the more technical side, we see references to the ability to navigate within multimodal gaming, VR and AR environments, or the ability to write and modify computer code. And for more complex combinations of skills, knowledge, attitudes and dispositions, we have things like the ability to develop a reputation and exert influence within online networks, or ‘the ability to exert a positive influence (online) by adopting a stance of intellectual humility and ethical pluralism’.

This is all a far remove from only seven years ago when ‘digital literacies’ were described as ‘the practices of reading, writing and communication made possible by digital media’ (Hafner et al., 2015) and the kinds of skills required were almost all closely connected to reading and writing. The digital world has changed, and so has our understanding of what it means to operate effectively within that world. Perhaps it is time, too, to change our terminology: ‘literacies’ is still with us, but it seems almost wilfully misleading. ‘Abilities’ or ‘competencies’ would seem to be much more appropriate terms to refer to what we are discussing in these frameworks, but ‘abilities’ probably isn’t sciency enough, and ‘competencies’ has already been done to death.

The problem with lumping all these things together under a single superordinate is that it seems to imply that there is some sort of equivalence between all the subordinate labels, that there is some categorial similarity. Pegrum et al (2022) acknowledge that there are differences of complexity between these ‘literacies’ – they use a star system to indicate degree of complexity. But I think that there is no sufficiently strong reason to put some of these things together in the first place. Dudeney at al (2013: 14) note that some of their literacies are ‘macroliteracies’ – ‘in other words, a literacy which draws on numerous other literacies – and involves linguistic, multimedia, spatial, kinaesthetic and other skills’. Why, then, call them ‘literacies’ at all? The only connection between knowing how to generate a LOLcat post and knowing how to ‘remain non-judgemental towards new perspectives, multiple viewpoints, and shifting contexts’ is that both are related to our use of digital technology. But since there is very little in our lives that is not now related in some way to digital technology, is this good enough reason to bracket these two abilities together?

Pegrum et al (2022) found that they needed to expand their list of digital literacies in the new edition of their book, and they will no doubt need to do so again nine years from now. But is the fact that something could be included in a taxonomy a good reason for actually including it? ‘Code literacy’, for example, seems rather less urgent now than it did nine years ago. I have never been convinced by gaming literacy or remix literacy. Are these really worth listing alongside the others in the table? Even if they are, nobody (including Pegrum et al.) would disagree that some prioritisation is necessary. However, when we refer to ‘digital literacies’ and how vital it is to teach them, we typically don’t specify a particular literacy and not another. We risk committing the logical error of assuming that something that holds true for a group or category, also holds true for all the members of the group or subordinates of the category.

Can digital literacies be taught?

There is clearly no particular problem in teaching and learning some digital literacies, especially the more technical ones. Unfortunately, the more specific and technical we are (e.g. when we mention a particular digital tool), the more likely it is that its shelf-life will be limited. Hardware comes and goes (I haven’t had to format a floppy disc for a while), as do apps and software. To the risk of wasting time teaching a skill that may soon be worthless, we may add the risk of not including literacies that have not yet found their way into the taxonomies. Examples include knowing how to avoid plagiarism detectors (as opposed to avoiding plagiarism) or how to use GPT-3 (and soon GPT-4) text generators. Handy for students.

The choice of digital tools is crucial when one of the key pieces of advice for teaching digital literacy is to integrate the use of digital tools into lessons (e.g. in the Cambridge Life Competencies Digital Literacy booklet). This advice skates over the key questions of which tool, and which literacy is being targeted (and why). Watching TikTok videos, using Mentimeter in class, or having a go with a VR headset may serve various educational purposes, but it would be stretching a point to argue that these activities will do much for anyone’s digital literacy. Encouraging teachers to integrate technology into their lessons (government policy in some countries) makes absolutely no sense unless the desired outcome – digital literacy – is precisely defined in advance. It rarely is. See here for further discussion.

Encouragement to include technology, any old technology, in lessons is almost never grounded in claims that a particular technical skill (e.g. navigating TikTok) has any pressing value. Rather, the justification usually comes from reference to what might be called ‘higher-order’ skills, like critical thinking: what I referred to earlier as curious amalgams of relatively straightforward skills and much more complex combinations of skills with knowledge, attitudes and dispositions.

The problem here is that it remains very uncertain whether things like ethical literacy or critical digital literacy are likely to be learnt through instruction. They can certainly be practised, and Pegrum et al (2022) have some very nice activities. The aims of these activities is typically described using a vague ‘raise awareness of’ formula, but whether they will lead, for example, to any improved ability ‘to exert a positive influence (online) by adopting a stance of intellectual humility and ethical pluralism’ is debatable. Much as the world might be a better place if classroom activities of this kind did actually work, research evidence is sadly lacking. For a more detailed look at the problems of trying to teach critical digital literacy / media information literacy, see here.

Should digital literacies be part of the English language curriculum?

So, is it ‘crucial for language teaching to […] encompass the digital literacies which are increasingly central to learners’ […] lives’ (Pegrum et al, 2022)? Well, it all depends on which digital literacies we are talking about. It also depends on what kind of learners in what kinds of learning contexts. And it depends on both institutional objectives and the personal objectives of the learners themselves. So, ‘crucial’, no, but we’ll put the choice of adjective down to rhetorical flourish.

Is it true that ‘digital literacies are as important to language learning as […] reading and writing skills […]’ (Pegrum et al., 2022: 1)? Clearly not. Since it’s hard to imagine any kind of digital literacy without some reading skills preceding it, the claim that they are comparable in importance is also best understood as rhetorical flourish.

A modicum of critical (digital) literacy is helpful when it comes to reading literature on digital literacies.

References

Dudeney, G., Hockly, N. & Pegrum, M. (2013) Digital Literacies. Harlow: Pearson Education

Hafner, C.A., Chik, A. & Jones, R. H. (2015) Digital Literacies and Language Learning, Language Learning & Technology, 19 (3): 1-  7

Pangrazio, L., Godhe, A.-L., & Ledesma, A. G. L. (2020) What is digital literacy? A comparative review of publications across three language contexts. E-Learning and Digital Media, 17(6), 442–459. https://doi.org/10.1177/204275302094629

Pegrum, M., Hockly, N. & Dudeney, G. (2022) Digital Literacies 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge

Pegrum, M., Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. (2018) Digital Literacies Revisited. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 7 (2): 3 – 24

Learning and earning

In the campaign for leadership of the British Conservative party, prime ministerial wannabe, Rishi Sunak, announced that he wanted to phase out all university degrees with low ‘earning potential’. This would mean the end of undergraduate courses in fashion, film, philosophy, English language and media studies. And linguistics. More of an attention-grabbing soundbite than anything else, it reflects a view of education that is shared by his competitor, Liz Truss, who ‘is passionate about giving every child basic maths and science skills’ as a way of driving the contribution of education to the economy.

It’s a view that is shared these days by practically everyone with any power and influence, from national governments to organisations like the EU and the OECD (Schuller, 2000). It is rooted in the belief that what matters most in education are the teachable knowledges, skills and competences that are relevant to economic activity (as the OECD puts it). These competences are seen to be essential to economic growth and competitivity, and essential to individuals to enhance their employment potential. Learning equals earning. The way for societies to push this orientation to education is to allow market forces to respond to the presumed demands of the consumers of education (students and their sponsors), as they seek to obtain the best possible return on their investment in education. Market forces are given more power when education is privatized and uncoupled from the state. For this to happen, the market may need a little help in the form of policies from the likes of Sunak and Truss.

This set of beliefs has a name: human capital theory (Becker, 1993). Human capital refers both to the skills that individuals ‘bring to bear in the economy and the need for capital investment in these’ (Holborow, 2012). It is impossible to overstate just how pervasive this theory in contemporary approaches to education is. See, for example, this selection of articles from Science Direct. It is also very easy to forget how recently the lens of human capital has become practically the only lens through which education is viewed.

Contemporary language teaching is perhaps best understood as a series of initiatives that have been driven by human capital theory. First and foremost, there is the global ‘frenzied rush towards acquiring English’ (Holborow, 2018), driven both by governments and by individuals who see that foreign language competence (especially English) ‘might […]open up new opportunities for students [and] assist them in breaking social barriers’ (Kormos & Kiddle, 2013). Children, at ever younger ages (even pre-school), are pushed towards getting a headstart in the race to acquire human capital, whilst there has been an explosive growth in EMI courses (Lasagabaster, 2022). At the same time, there has been mushrooming interest in so-called 21^st century skills (or ‘life skills’ / ‘global skills’) in the English language curriculum. These skills have been identified by asking employers what skills matter most to them when recruiting staff. Critical and creative thinking skills may be seen as having pre-Human Capital, intrinsic educational worth, but it is their potential contribution to economic productivity that explains their general current acceptance.

Investments in human capital need to be measured and measurable. Language teaching needs to be made accountable. Our preoccupation with learning outcomes is seen in the endless number of competency frameworks, and with new tools for quantifying language proficiency. Technology facilitates this evaluation, promises to deliver language teaching more efficiently, and technological skills are, after English language skills themselves, seen to be the most bankable of 21^st century skills. Current interest in social-emotional learning – growth mindsets, grit, resilience and so on – is also driven by a concern to make learning more efficient.

In all of these aspects of language teaching / learning, the private sector (often in private-public partnerships) is very visible. This is by design. Supported by the state, the market economy of education grows in tandem with the rising influence of the private sector on national educational policy. When education ministers lose their job, they can easily find well-paid consultancies in the private sector (as in the case of Sunak and Truss’s colleague, Gavin Williamson).

One of the powers of market-economy ideologies is that it often seems that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA). There are, however, good reasons to try to think in alternative terms. To begin with, and limiting ourselves for the moment to language teaching, there is a desperate lack of evidence that starting English language learning at very young ages (in the way that is most typically done) will lead to any appreciable gains in the human capital race. It is generally recognised that EMI is highly problematic in a variety of ways (Lasagabaster, 2022). The focus on 21^st century skills has not led to any significant growth in learning outcomes when these skills are measured. There is a worrying lack of evidence that interventions in schools to promote improvements in critical or creative thinking have had much, if any, impact at all. Similarly, there is a worrying lack of evidence that attention to growth mindsets or grit has led to very much at all. Personalized learning, facilitated by technology, likewise has a dismal track record. At the same time, there is no evidence that the interest in measuring learning outcomes has led to any improvement in those outcomes. For all the millions and millions that have been invested in all these trends, the returns have been very slim. Perhaps we would have done better to look for solutions to those aspects of language teaching which we know to be problematic. The obsession with synthetic syllabuses delivered by coursebooks (or their online equivalents) comes to mind.

But beyond the failure of all these things to deliver on their promises, there are broader issues. Although language skills (usually English) have the potential to enhance employment prospects, Holborow (2018) has noted that they do not necessarily do so (see, for example, Yeung & Gray, 2022). Precisely how important language skills are is very hard to determine. A 2016 survey by Cambridge English found that ‘approximately half of all employers offer a better starting package to applicants with good English language skills’ and a similar number indicate that these skills result in faster career progression. But these numbers need to be treated with caution, not least because Cambridge English is in the business of selling English. More importantly, it seems highly unlikely that the figures that are reported reflect the reality of job markets around the world. The survey observes that banking, finance and law are the sectors with the greatest need for such skills, but these are all usually graduate posts. An average of 39% of the population in OECD countries has tertiary education; the percentage is much lower elsewhere. How many students of a given age cohort will actually work in these sectors? Even in rich countries, like Germany and the Netherlands, between 40 and 60% of workers are employed in what is termed ‘nonstandard forms of work’ (OECD, 2015) where language skills will count for little or nothing. These numbers are growing. Language skills are of most value to those students who are already relatively advantaged. That is not to say that there are no potential benefits to everyone in learning English, but these benefits will not be found in better jobs and wages for the majority. One interesting case study describes how a Swiss airport company exploits the language skills of migrant workers, without any benefits (salary or mobility) accruing to the workers themselves (Duchêne, 2011).

The relationship between learning English and earning more is a lot more complex than is usually presented. The same holds true for learning more generally. In the US, ‘nearly two-thirds of job openings in 2020 required no more than a high school diploma’ (Brown et al., 2022: 222). Earnings for graduates in real terms are in decline, except for those at the very top. For the rest, over $1.3 trillion in student loan debt remains unpaid. Elsewhere in the world, the picture is more mixed, but it is clear that learning does not equal earning in the global gig economy.

This evident uncoupling of learning from earning has led some to conclude that education is ‘a waste of time and money’ (Caplan, 2018), a view that has been gaining traction in the US. It’s not an entirely unreasonable view, if the only reason for education is seen to be its contribution to the economy. More commonly, the reaction has been to double-down on human capital theory. In Spain, for example, with its high levels of youth unemployment, there are calls for closer links between educational institutions, and graduates themselves are blamed for failing to take ‘advantage of the upgrading in the demand for skills’ (Bentolilla et al., 2022). This seems almost wilfully cruel, especially since the authors note that there is global trend in falling economic returns in tertiary education (ILO, 2020).

But, rather than doubling-down on human capital theory (e.g. more vocational training, more efficient delivery of the training), it might be a good idea to question human capital theory itself. Both early and more recent critics have tended to accept without hesitation that education can enhance worker productivity, but argue that, as a theory, it is too simplistic to have much explanatory power, and that the supporting evidence is weak, vague or untestable (Bowles & Gintis, 1975; Fix, 2018). Language skills, like education more generally, do not always lead to better employment prospects and salaries, because ‘wider, systemic social inequalities come into play’ (Holborow, 2018). It is not because black women need to brush up on their 21^st century skills that they earn less than white men.

Until recently, critics of human capital theory have been a minority, and largely unheard, voice. But this appear to be changing. The World Bank, more guilty than anyone for pushing human capital theory on the global stage (see here), has recognised that hoped-for job outcomes do not always materialize after massive investments in training systems (World Bank, 2013). Mainstream critics include the Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, and the recent OUP title, ‘The Death of Human Capital?’ (Brown et al., 2020) is likely to spur debate further. The assumption that human capital theory holds water no longer holds water.

When we turn back to English language teaching, we might benefit from some new thinking. For sure, there will be large numbers of English language learners whose only purpose in studying is utilitarian, whose primary desire is to enhance their human capital. But there are also millions, especially children studying in public schools, for whom things are rather different. A major change in thinking involves a reconceptualization of the point of all this English study. If learning English is not, for the majority, seen primarily as a preparation for the workplace, but as compensation for the realities of (un)employment (Brown et al., 2020: 13), most of the recent innovations in ELT would become highly suspect. We would have a much less impoverished view of ‘the complex and multifaceted nature of language’ (Holborow, 2018) and we would find more space for plurilingual practices. A brake on relentless Englishization might be no bad thing (Wilkinson & Gabriëls, 2021). We might be able to explore more fully artistic and creative uses of language. Who knows? We might finally get round to wider implementation of language teaching approaches that we know have a decent chance of success.

References

Becker, G. S. (1993). Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (3^rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Bentolila, S., Felgueroso, F., Jansen, M. et al. (2022). Lost in recessions: youth employment and earnings in Spain. SERIEs 13: 11–49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13209-021-00244-6

Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1975). The Problem with Human Capital Theory – a Marxian critique. The American Economic Review, 65 (2): 74 – 83

Brown, S., Lauder, H. & Cheung, S. Y. (2020). The Death of Human Capital? New York: Oxford University Press

Caplan, B. (2018). The Case against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Duchêne, A. (2011). Neoliberalism, Social Inequalities, and Multilingualism: The Exploitation of Linguistic Resources and Speakers. Langage et Société, 136 (2): 81 – 108

Fix, B. (2018). The Trouble with Human Capital Theory. Working Papers on Capital as Power, No. 2018/7

Holborow, M. (2012). Neoliberal keywords and the contradictions of an ideology. In Block, D., Gray, J. & Holborow, M. Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics. Abingdon: Routledge: 33 – 55

Holborow, M. (2018). Language skills as human capital? Challenging the neoliberal frame. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18: (5): 520-532

ILO (2020). Global employment trends for youth, 2020. Geneva: International Labour Organization

Kormos, J., & Kiddle, T. (2013). The role of socio-economic factors in motivation to learn English as a foreign language: the case of Chile. System, 41(2): 399-412

Lasagabaster, D. (2022). English-Medium Instruction in Higher Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

OECD (2015). In It Together, Why Less Inequality Benefits All. Paris: OECD

Schuller, T. (2000). Social and Human Capital: The Search for Appropriate Technomethodology. Policy Studies, 21 (1): 25 – 35

Wilkinson, R., & Gabriëls, R. (Eds.) (2021). The Englishization of Higher Education in Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

World Bank (2012). World Development Report 2013: Jobs. Washington, DC: World Bank

Yeung, S. & Gray, J. (2022). Neoliberalism, English, and spoiled identity: The case of a high-achieving university graduate in Hong Kong. Language in Society, First View, pp. 1 – 22

Doing critical thinking to others

There’s a video on YouTube from Oxford University Press in which the presenter, the author of a coursebook for primary English language learners (‘Oxford Discover’), describes an activity where students have a short time to write some sentences about a picture they have been shown. Then, working in pairs, they read aloud their partner’s sentences and award themselves points, with more points being given for sentences that others have not come up with. For lower level, young learners, it’s not a bad activity. It provides opportunities for varied skills practice of a limited kind and, if it works, may be quite fun and motivating. However, what I found interesting about the video is that it is entitled ‘How to teach critical thinking skills: speaking’ and the book that is being promoted claims to develop ‘21st Century Skills in critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity’. The presenter says that the activity achieves its critical thinking goals by promoting ‘both noticing and giving opinions, […] two very important critical thinking skills.’

Noticing (or observation) and giving opinions are often included in lists of critical thinking skills, but, for this to be the case, they must presumably be exercised in a critical way – some sort of reasoning must be involved. This is not the case here, so only the most uncritical understanding of critical thinking could consider this activity to have any connection to critical thinking. Whatever other benefits might accrue from it, it seems highly unlikely that the students’ ability to notice or express opinions will be developed.

My scepticism is not shared by many users of the book. Oxford University Press carried out a scientific-sounding ‘impact study’: this consisted of a questionnaire (n = 198) in which ‘97% of teachers reported that using Oxford Discover helps their students to improve in the full range of 21st century skills, with critical thinking and communication scoring the highest’.

Enthusiasm for critical thinking activities is extremely widespread. In 2018, TALIS, the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (with more than 4000 respondents) found that ‘over 80% of teachers feel confident in their ability to vary instructional strategies in their classroom and help students think critically’ and almost 60% ‘frequently or always’ ‘give students tasks that require students to think critically.’ Like the Oxford ‘impact study’, it’s worth remembering that these are self-reporting figures.

This enthusiasm is shared in the world of English language teaching, reflected in at least 17 presentations at the 2021 IATEFL conference that discussed practical ideas for promoting critical thinking. These ranged from the more familiar (e.g. textual analysis in EAP) to the more original – developing critical thinking through the use of reading reaction journals, multicultural literature, fables, creative arts performances, self-expression, escape rooms, and dice games.

In most cases, it would appear that the precise nature of the critical thinking that was ostensibly being developed was left fairly vague. This vagueness is not surprising. Practically the only thing that writers about critical thinking in education can agree on is that there is no general agreement about what, precisely, critical thinking is. Lai (2011) offers an accessible summary of a range of possible meanings, but points out that, in educational contexts, its meaning is often rather vague and encompasses other concepts (such as higher order thinking skills) which also lack clarity. Paul Dummett and John Hughes (2019: 4) plump for ‘a mindset that involves thinking reflectively, rationally and reasonably’ – a vague definition which leaves unanswered two key questions: to what extent is it a skill set or a disposition? Are these skills generic or domain specific?

When ‘critical thinking’ is left undefined, it is impossible to evaluate the claims that a particular classroom activity will contribute to the development of critical thinking. However, irrespective of the definition, there are good reasons to be sceptical about the ability of educational activities to have a positive impact on the generic critical thinking skills of learners in English language classes. There can only be critical-thinking value in the activity described at the beginning of this post if learners somehow transfer the skills they practise in the activity to other domains of their lives. This is, of course, possible, but, if we approach the question with a critical disposition, we have to conclude that it is unlikely. We may continue to believe the opposite, but this would be an uncritical act of faith.

The research evidence on the efficacy of teaching generic critical thinking is not terribly encouraging (Tricot & Sweller, 2014). There’s no shortage of anecdotal support for classroom critical thinking, but ‘education researchers have spent over a century searching for, and failing to find evidence of, transfer to unrelated domains by the use of generic-cognitive skills’ (Sweller, 2022). One recent meta-analysis (Huber & Kuncel, 2016) found insufficient evidence to justify the explicit teaching of generic critical thinking skills at college level. In an earlier blog post https://adaptivelearninginelt.wordpress.com/2020/10/16/fake-news-and-critical-thinking-in-elt/ looking at the impact of critical thinking activities on our susceptibility to fake news, I noted that research was unable to find much evidence of the value of media literacy training. When considerable time is devoted to generic critical thinking training and little or no impact is found, how likely is it that the kind of occasional, brief one-off activity in the ELT classroom will have the desired impact? Without going as far as to say that critical thinking activities in the ELT classroom have no critical-thinking value, it is uncontentious to say that we still do not know how to define critical thinking, how to assess evidence of it, or how to effectively practise and execute it (Gay & Clark, 2021).

It is ironic that there is so little critical thinking about critical thinking in the world of English language teaching, but it should not be particularly surprising. Teachers are no more immune to fads than anyone else (Fuertes-Prieto et al., 2020). Despite a complete lack of robust evidence to support them, learning styles and multiple intelligences influenced language teaching for many years. Mindfulness, growth mindsets, grit are more contemporary influences and, like critical thinking, will go the way of learning styles when the commercial and institutional forces that currently promote them find the lack of empirical supporting evidence problematic.

Critical thinking is an educational aim shared by educational authorities around the world, promoted by intergovernmental bodies like the OECD, the World Bank, the EU, and the United Nations. In Japan, for example, the ‘Ministry of Education (MEXT) puts critical thinking (CT) at the forefront of its ‘global jinzai’ (human capital for a global society) directive’ (Gay & Clark, 2021). It is taught as an academic discipline in some universities in Russia (Ivlev et al, 2021) and plans are underway to introduce it into schools in Saudi Arabia. https://www.arabnews.com/node/1764601/saudi-arabia I suspect that it doesn’t mean quite the same thing in all these places.

Critical thinking is also an educational aim that most teachers can share. Few like to think of themselves as Gradgrinds, bashing facts into their pupils’ heads: turning children into critical thinkers is what education is supposed to be all about. It holds an intuitive appeal, and even if we (20% of teachers in the TALIS survey) lack confidence in our ability to promote critical thinking in the classroom, few of us doubt the importance of trying to do so. Like learning styles, multiple intelligences and growth mindsets, it seems possible that, with critical thinking, we are pushing the wrong thing, but for the right reasons. But just how much evidence, or lack of evidence, do we need before we start getting critical about critical thinking?

References

Dummett, P. & Hughes, J. (2019) Critical Thinking in ELT. Boston: National Geographic Learning

Fuertes-Prieto, M.Á., Andrés-Sánchez, S., Corrochano-Fernández, D. et al. (2020) Pre-service Teachers’ False Beliefs in Superstitions and Pseudosciences in Relation to Science and Technology. Science & Education 29, 1235–1254 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-020-00140-8

Gay, S. & Clark, G. (2021) Revisiting Critical Thinking Constructs and What This Means for ELT. Critical Thinking and Language Learning, 8 (1): pp. 110 – 147

Huber, C.R. & Kuncel, N.R. (2016) Does College Teach Critical Thinking? A Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research. 2016: 86 (2) pp.:431-468. doi:10.3102/0034654315605917

Ivlev, V. Y., Pozdnyakov, M. V., Inozemtsez, V. A. & Chernyak, A. Z. (2021) Critical Thinking in the Structure of Educational Programs in Russian Universities. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 555: pp. 121 -128

Lai, E.R. 2011. Critical Thinking: A Literature Review. Pearson. http://images.pearsonassessments.com/images/tmrs/CriticalThinkingReviewFINAL.pdf

Sweller, J. (2022) Some Critical Thoughts about Critical and Creative Thinking. Sydney: The Centre for Independent Studies Analysis Paper 32

Tricot, A., & Sweller, J. (2014) Domain-specific knowledge and why teaching generic skills does not work. Educational Psychology Review, 26, 265- 283.

The digital future of education (according to the OECD)

On 21 January, I attended the launch webinar of DEFI (the Digital Education Futures Initiative), an initiative of the University of Cambridge, which seeks to work ‘with partners in industry, policy and practice to explore the field of possibilities that digital technology opens up for education’. The opening keynote speaker was Andrea Schleicher, head of education at the OECD. The OECD’s vision of the future of education is outlined in Schleicher’s book, ‘World Class: How to Build a 21st-Century School System’, freely available from the OECD, but his presentation for DEFI offers a relatively short summary. A recording is available here, and this post will take a closer look at some of the things he had to say.

Schleicher is a statistician and the coordinator of the OECD’s PISA programme. Along with other international organisations, such as the World Economic Forum and the World Bank (see my post here), the OECD promotes the global economization and corporatization of education, ‘based on the [human capital] view that developing work skills is the primary purpose of schooling’ (Spring, 2015: 14). In other words, the main proper function of education is seen to be meeting the needs of global corporate interests. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the impact of school closures becoming very visible, Schleicher expressed concern about the disruption to human capital development, but thought it was ‘a great moment’: ‘the current wave of school closures offers an opportunity for experimentation and for envisioning new models of education’. Every cloud has a silver lining, and the pandemic has been a godsend for private companies selling digital learning (see my post about this here) and for those who want to reimagine education in a more corporate way.

Schleicher’s presentation for DEFI was a good opportunity to look again at the way in which organisations like the OECD are shaping educational discourse (see my post about the EdTech imaginary and ELT).

He begins by suggesting that, as a result of the development of digital technology (Google, YouTube, etc.) literacy is ‘no longer just about extracting knowledge’. PISA reading scores, he points out, have remained more or less static since 2000, despite the fact that we have invested (globally) more than 15% extra per student in this time. Only 9% of all 15-year-old students in the industrialised world can distinguish between fact and opinion.

To begin with, one might argue about the reliability and validity of the PISA reading scores (Berliner, 2020). One might also argue, as did a collection of 80 education experts in a letter to the Guardian, that the scores themselves are responsible for damaging global education, raising further questions about their validity. One might argue that the increased investment was spent in the wrong way (e.g. on hardware and software, rather than teacher training, for example), because the advice of organisations like OECD has been uncritically followed. And the statistic about critical reading skills is fairly meaningless unless it is compared to comparable metrics over a long time span: there is no reason to believe that susceptibility to fake news is any more of a problem now than it was, say, one hundred years ago. Nor is there any reason to believe that education can solve the fake-news problem (see my post about fake news and critical thinking here). These are more than just quibbles, but the main point that Schleicher is making is that education needs to change.

Schleicher next presents a graph which is designed to show that the amount of time that students spend studying correlates poorly with the amount they learn. His interest is in the (lack of) productivity of educational activities in some contexts. He goes on to argue that there is greater productivity in educational activities when learners have a growth mindset, implying (but not stating) that mindset interventions in schools would lead to a more productive educational environment.

Schleicher appears to confuse what students learn with the things they have learnt that have been measured by PISA. The two are obviously rather different, since PISA is only interested in a relatively small subset of the possible learning outcomes of schooling. His argument for growth mindset interventions hinges on the assumption that such interventions will lead to gains in reading scores. However, his graph demonstrates a correlation between growth mindset and reading scores, not a causal relationship. A causal relationship has not been clearly and empirically demonstrated (see my post about growth mindsets here) and recent work by Carol Dweck and her associates (e.g. Yeager et al., 2016), as well as other researchers (e.g. McPartlan et al, 2020), indicates that the relationship between gains in learning outcomes and mindset interventions is extremely complex.

Schleicher then turns to digitalisation and briefly discusses the positive and negative affordances of technology. He eulogizes platform companies before showing a slide designed to demonstrate that (in the workplace) there is a strong correlation between ICT use and learning. He concludes: ‘the digital world of learning is a hugely empowering world of learning’.

A brief paraphrase of this very disingenuous part of the presentation would be: technology can be good and bad, but I’ll only focus on the former. The discourse appears balanced, but it is anything but.

During the segment, Schleicher argues that technology is empowering, and gives the examples of ‘the most successful companies these days, they’re not created by a big industry, they’re created by a big idea’. This is plainly counterfactual. In the case of Alphabet and Facebook, profits did not follow from a ‘big idea’: the ideas changed as the companies evolved.

Schleicher then sketches a picture of an unpredictable future (pandemics, climate change, AI, cyber wars, etc.) as a way of framing the importance of being open (and resilient) to different futures and how we respond to them. He offers two different kinds of response: maintenance of the status quo, or ‘outsourcing’ of education. The pandemic, he suggests, has made more countries aware that the latter is the way forward.

In his discussion of the maintenance of the status quo, Schleicher talks about the maintenance of educational monopolies. By this, he must be referring to state monopolies on education: this is a favoured way of neoliberals of referring to state-sponsored education. But the extent to which, in 2021 in many OECD countries, the state has any kind of monopoly of education, is very open to debate. Privatization is advancing fast. Even in 2015, the World Education Forum’s ‘Final Report’ wrote that ‘the scale of engagement of nonstate actors at all levels of education is growing and becoming more diversified’. Schleicher goes on to talk about ‘large, bureaucratic school systems’, suggesting that such systems cannot be sufficiently agile, adaptive or responsive. ‘We should ask this question,’ he says, but his own answer to it is totally transparent: ‘changing education can be like moving graveyards’ is the title of the next slide. Education needs to be more like the health sector, he claims, which has been able to develop a COVID vaccine in such a short period of time. We need an education industry that underpins change in the same way as the health industry underpins vaccine development. In case his message isn’t yet clear enough, I’ll spell it out: education needs to be privatized still further.

Schleicher then turns to the ways in which he feels that digital technology can enhance learning. These include the use of AR, VR and AI. Technology, he says, can make learning so much more personalized: ‘the computer can study how you study, and then adapt learning so that it is much more granular, so much more adaptive, so much more responsive to your learning style’. He moves on to the field of assessment, again singing the praises of technology in the ways that it can offer new modes of assessment and ‘increase the reliability of machine rating for essays’. Through technology, we can ‘reunite learning and assessment’. Moving on to learning analytics, he briefly mentions privacy issues, before enthusing at greater length about the benefits of analytics.

Learning styles? Really? The reliability of machine scoring of essays? How reliable exactly? Data privacy as an area worth only a passing mention? The use of sensors to measure learners’ responses to learning experiences? Any pretence of balance appears now to have been shed. This is in-your-face sales talk.

Next up is a graph which purports to show the number of teachers in OECD countries who use technology for learners’ project work. This is followed by another graph showing the number of teachers who have participated in face-to-face and online CPD. The point of this is to argue that online CPD needs to become more common.

I couldn’t understand what point he was trying to make with the first graph. For the second, it is surely the quality of the CPD, rather than the channel, that matters.

Schleicher then turns to two further possible responses of education to unpredictable futures: ‘schools as learning hubs’ and ‘learn-as-you-go’. In the latter, digital infrastructure replaces physical infrastructure. Neither is explored in any detail. The main point appears to be that we should consider these possibilities, weighing up as we do so the risks and the opportunities (see slide below).

Useful ways to frame questions about the future of education, no doubt, but Schleicher is operating with a set of assumptions about the purpose of education, which he chooses not to explore. His fundamental assumption – that the primary purpose of education is to develop human capital in and for the global economy – is not one that I would share. However, if you do take that view, then privatization, economization, digitalization and the training of social-emotional competences are all reasonable corollaries, and the big question about the future concerns how to go about this in a more efficient way.

Schleicher’s (and the OECD’s) views are very much in accord with the libertarian values of the right-wing philanthro-capitalist foundations of the United States (the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and so on), funded by Silicon Valley and hedge-fund managers. It is to the US that we can trace the spread and promotion of these ideas, but it is also, perhaps, to the US that we can now turn in search of hope for an alternative educational future. The privatization / disruption / reform movement in the US has stalled in recent years, as it has become clear that it failed to deliver on its promise of improved learning. The resistance to privatized and digitalized education is chronicled in Diane Ravitch’s latest book, ‘Slaying Goliath’ (2020). School closures during the pandemic may have been ‘a great moment’ for Schleicher, but for most of us, they have underscored the importance of face-to-face free public schooling. Now, with the electoral victory of Joe Biden and the appointment of a new US Secretary for Education (still to be confirmed), we are likely to see, for the first time in decades, an education policy that is firmly committed to public schools. The US is by far the largest contributor to the budget of the OECD – more than twice any other nation. Perhaps a rethink of the OECD’s educational policies will soon be in order?

References

Berliner D.C. (2020) The Implications of Understanding That PISA Is Simply Another Standardized Achievement Test. In Fan G., Popkewitz T. (Eds.) Handbook of Education Policy Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8343-4_13

McPartlan, P., Solanki, S., Xu, D. & Sato, B. (2020) Testing Basic Assumptions Reveals When (Not) to Expect Mindset and Belonging Interventions to Succeed. AERA Open, 6 (4): 1 – 16 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2332858420966994

Ravitch, D. (2020) Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public School. New York: Vintage Books

Schleicher, A. (2018) World Class: How to Build a 21^st-Century School System. Paris: OECD Publishing https://www.oecd.org/education/world-class-9789264300002-en.htm

Spring, J. (2015) Globalization of Education 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge

Yeager, D. S., et al. (2016) Using design thinking to improve psychological interventions: The case of the growth mindset during the transition to high school. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 374–391. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000098

Fake news and critical thinking in ELT

Since no single definition of critical thinking prevails (Dummett & Hughes, 2019: 2), discussions of the topic invariably begin with attempts to provide a definition. Lai (2011) offers an accessible summary of a range of possible meanings, but points out that, in educational contexts, its meaning is often rather vague and encompasses other concepts (such as higher order thinking skills) which also lack clarity. Paul Dummett and John Hughes (2019: 4) plump for ‘a mindset that involves thinking reflectively, rationally and reasonably’ – a definition which involves a vague noun (that could mean a fixed state of mind, a learned attitude, a disposition or a mood) and three highly subjective adverbs. I don’t think I could do any better. However, instead of looking for a definition, we can reach a sort of understanding by looking at examples of it. Dummett and Hughes’ book is extremely rich in practical examples, and the picture that emerges of critical thinking is complex and multifaceted.

As you might expect of a weasel word like ‘critical thinking’, there appears to be general agreement that it’s a ‘good thing’. Paul Dummett suggests that there are two common reasons for promoting the inclusion of critical thinking activities in the language classroom. The first of these is a desire to get students thinking for themselves. The second is the idea ‘that we live in an age of misinformation in which only the critically minded can avoid manipulation or slavish conformity’. Neither seems contentious at first glance, although he points out that ‘they tend to lead to a narrow application of critical thinking in ELT materials: that is to say, the analysis of texts and evaluation of the ideas expressed in them’. It’s the second of these rationales that I’d like to explore further.

Penny Ur (2020: 9) offers a more extended version of it:

The role of critical thinking in education has become more central in the 21^st century, simply because there is far more information readily available to today’s students than there was in previous centuries (mainly, but not only, online), and it is vital for them to be able to deal with such input wisely. They need to be able to distinguish between what is important and what is trivial, between truth and lies, between fact and opinion, between logical argument and specious propaganda […] Without such skills and awareness of the need to exercise them, they are liable to find themselves victims of commercial or political interests, their thinking manipulated by persuasion disguised as information.

In the same edited collection Olja Milosevic (2020:18) echoes Ur’s argument:

Critical thinking becomes even more important as communication increasingly moves online. Students find an overwhelming amount of information and need to be taught how to evaluate its relevance, accuracy and quality. If teachers do not teach students how to go beyond surface meaning, students cannot be expected to practise it.

In the passages I’ve quoted, these writers are referring to one particular kind of critical thinking. The ability to critically evaluate the reliability, accuracy, etc of a text is generally considered to be a part of what is usually called ‘media information literacy’. In these times of fake news, so the argument goes, it is vital for students to develop (with their teachers’ help) the necessary skills to spot fake news when they see it. The most prototypical critical thinking activity in ELT classrooms is probably one in which students analyse some fake news, such as the website about the Pacific Tree Octopus (which is the basis of a lesson in Dudeney et al., 2013: 198 – 203).

Before considering media information literacy in more detail, it’s worth noting in passing that a rationale for critical thinking activities is no rationale at all if it only concerns one aspect of critical thinking, since it has applied attributes of a part (media information literacy) to a bigger whole (critical thinking).

There is no shortage of good (free) material available for dealing with fake news in the ELT classroom. Examples include work by James Taylor, Chia Suan Chong and Tyson Seburn. Material of this kind may result in lively, interesting, cognitively challenging, communicative and, therefore, useful lessons. But how likely is it that material of this kind will develop learners’ media information literacy and, by extension therefore, their critical thinking skills? How likely is it that teaching material of this kind will help people identify (and reject) fake news? Is it possible that material of this kind is valuable despite its rationale, rather than because of it? In the spirit of rational, reflective and reasonable thinking, these are questions that seem to be worth exploring.

ELT classes and fake news

James Taylor has suggested that the English language classroom is ‘the perfect venue for [critical thinking] skills to be developed’. Although academic English courses necessarily involve elements of critical thinking, I’m not so sure that media information literacy (and, specifically, the identification of fake news) can be adequately addressed in general English classes. There are so many areas, besides those that are specifically language-focussed, competing for space in language classes (think of all those other 21^st century skills), that it is hard to see how sufficient time can be found for real development of this skill. It requires modelling, practice of the skill, feedback on the practice, and more practice (Mulnix, 2010): it needs time. Fake news activities in the language classroom would, of course, be of greater value if they were part of an integrated approach across the curriculum. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.

Information literacy skills

Training materials for media information literacy usually involve a number of stages. These include things like fact-checking and triangulation of different sources, consideration of web address, analysis of images, other items on the site, source citation and so on. The problem, however, is that news-fakers have become so good at what they do. The tree octopus site is very crude in comparison to what can be produced nowadays by people who have learnt to profit from the online economy of misinformation. Facebook employs an army of algorithmic and human fact-checkers, but still struggles. The bottom line is that background knowledge is needed (this is as true for media information literacy as it is for critical thinking more generally) (Willingham, 2007). With news, the scope of domain knowledge is so vast that it is extremely hard to transfer one’s ability to critically evaluate one particular piece of news to another. We are all fooled from time to time.

Media information literacy interventions: research on effectiveness

With the onset of COVID-19, the ability to identify fake news has become, more than ever, a matter of life and death. There is little question that this ability correlates strongly with analytic thinking (see, for example, Stanley et al., 2020). What is much less clear is how we can go about promoting analytic thinking. Analytic thinking comes in different varieties, and another hot-off-the-press research study into susceptibility to COVID-19 fake news (Roozenbeek et al., 2020) has found that the ability to spot fake news may correlate more strongly with numerical literacy than with reasoning ability. In fact, the research team found that a lack of numerical literacy was the most consistent predictor of susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19. Perhaps we are attempting to develop the wrong kind of analytic thinking?

In educational contexts, attempts to promote media information literacy typically seek to develop reasoning abilities, and the evidence for their effectiveness is mixed. First of all, it needs to be said that ‘little large-scale evidence exists on the effectiveness of promoting digital media literacy as a response to online misinformation’ (Guess et al., 2020). An early meta-analysis (Jeong et al., 2012) found that such interventions had a positive effect, when the interventions were long (not one-off), but impacted more on students’ knowledge than they did on their behaviour. More recently, Huguet et al (2019) were unable to draw ‘definitive conclusions from past research, such as what kinds of media literacy practices work and under what conditions’. And this year, a study by Guess et al (2020) did not generate sufficient evidence ‘to conclude that the [media information literacy] intervention changed real-world consumption of false news’. I am unaware of any robust research in this area in the context of ELT.

It’s all rather disappointing. Why are we not better at it? After all, teachers of media studies have been exploring pathways for many years now. One possible answer is this: Media information literacy, like critical thinking more generally, is a skill that is acquirable, but it can only be acquired if there is a disposition to do so. The ability to think critically and the disposition to do so are separate entities (Facione, 2000). Training learners to be more critical in their approach to media information may be so much pissing in the wind if the disposition to be sceptical is not there. Shaping dispositions is a much harder task than training skills.

Both of the research studies into susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation that I referred to earlier in this section underscore the significance of dispositions to analytic thinking. Roozenbeek et al (2020) found, in line with much previous research (for example, Jost et al. 2018), that political conservatism is associated with a slightly higher susceptibility to misinformation. Political views (on either side of the political spectrum) rarely change as a result of exposure to science or reasoned thinking. They also found that ‘self-identifying as a member of a minority predicts susceptibility to misinformation about the virus in all countries surveyed’ (except, interestingly, in the UK). Again, when issues of identity are at stake, emotional responses tend to trump rational ones.

Rational, reflective and reasonable thinking about media information literacy leads to an uncomfortable red-pill rabbit-hole. This is how Bulger and Davidson (2018) put it:

The extent to which media literacy can combat the problematic news environment is an open question. Is denying the existence of climate change a media literacy problem? Is believing that a presidential candidate was running a sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza shop a media literacy problem? Can media literacy combat the intentionally opaque systems of serving news on social media platforms? Or intentional campaigns of disinformation?

Teachers and fake news

The assumption that the critical thinking skills of young people can be developed through the intervention of their teachers is rarely problematized. It should be. A recent study of Spanish pre-service teachers (Fuertes-Prieto et al., 2020) showed that their ‘level of belief in pseudoscientific issues is comparable, or even higher in some cases to those of the general population’. There is no reason to believe that this changes after they have qualified. Teachers are probably no more likely to change their beliefs when presented with empirical evidence (Menz et al., 2020) than people from any other profession. Research has tended to focus on teachers’ lack of critical thinking in areas related to their work, but, things may be no different in the wider world. It is estimated that over a quarter of teachers in the US voted for the world’s greatest peddler of fake news in the 2016 presidential election.

It is also interesting to note that the sharing of fake news on social media is much more widespread among older people (including US teachers who have an average age of 42.4) than those under 30 (Bouygues, 2019).

Institutional contexts and fake news

Cory Doctorow has suggested that the fake news problem is not a problem of identifying what is true and what is fake, but a problem ‘about how we know whether something is true. We’re not disagreeing about facts, we’re disagreeing about epistemology’. In a post-modernist world of ‘Truth Decay’ (Kavanagh & Rich, 2018), where there is ‘a blurring of the line between opinion and fact’, epistemological authority is a rare commodity. Medicine, social sciences and applied linguistics are all currently experiencing a ‘replication crisis’ (Ioannidis, 2005) and we had a British education minister saying that ‘people of this country have had enough of experts’.

News reporting has always relied to some extent on trust in the reliability of the news source. The BBC or CNN might attempt to present themselves as more objective than, say, Fox News or InfoWars, but trust in all news outlets has collapsed globally in recent years. As Michael Shudson has written in the Columbia Journalism Review, ‘all news outlets write from a set of values, not simply from a disinterested effort at truth’. If a particular news channel manifestly shares different values from your own, it is easy to reject the veracity of the news it reports. Believers in COVID conspiracy theories often hold their views precisely because of their rejection of the epistemological authority of mainstream news and the WHO or governments who support lockdown measures.

The training of media information literacy in schools is difficult because, for many people in the US (and elsewhere), education is not dissimilar to mainstream media. They ‘are seen as the enemy — two institutions who are trying to have power over how people think. Two institutions that are trying to assert authority over epistemology’ (boyd, 2018). Schools have always been characterized by imbalances in power (between students and teachers / administrators), and this power dynamic is not conducive to open-minded enquiry. Children are often more aware of the power of their teachers than they are accepting of their epistemological authority. They are enjoined to be critical thinkers, but only about certain things and only up to a certain point. One way for children to redress the power imbalance is to reject the epistemological authority of their teachers. I think this may explain why a group of young children I observed recently coming out of a lesson devoted to environmental issues found such pleasure in joking about Greta ‘Thunfisch’.

Power relationships in schools are reflected and enacted in the interaction patterns between teachers and students. The most common of these is ‘initiation-response-feedback (IRF)’ and it is unlikely that this is particularly conducive to rational, reflective and reasonable thinking. At the same time, as Richard Paul, one of the early advocates of critical thinking in schools, noted, much learning activity is characterised by lower order thinking skills, especially memorization (Paul, 1992: 22). With this kind of backdrop, training in media information literacy is more likely to be effective if it goes beyond the inclusion of a few ‘fake news’ exercises: a transformation in the way that the teaching is done will also be needed. Benesch (1999) describes this as a more ‘dialogic’ approach and there is some evidence that a more dialogic approach can have a positive impact on students’ dispositions (e.g. Hajhosseiny, 2012).

I think that David Buckingham (2019a) captures the educational problem very neatly:

There’s a danger here of assuming that we are dealing with a rational process – or at least one that can, by some pedagogical means, be made rational. But from an educational perspective, we surely have to begin with the question of why people might believe apparently ‘fake’ news in the first place. Where we decide to place our trust is as much to do with fantasy, emotion and desire, as with rational calculation. All of us are inclined to believe what we want to believe.

Fake news: a problem or a symptom of a problem?

There has always been fake news. The big problem now is ‘the speed and ease of its dissemination, and it exists primarily because today’s digital capitalism makes it extremely profitable – look at Google and Facebook – to produce and circulate false but click-worthy narratives’ (Morosov, 2017). Fake news taps into and amplifies broader tendencies and divides in society: the problem is not straightforward and is unlikely to be easy to eradicate (Buckingham, 2019a: 3).

There is increasing discussion of media regulation and the recent banning by Facebook of Holocaust denial and QAnon is a recognition that some regulation cannot now be avoided. But strict regulations would threaten the ‘basic business model, and the enormous profitability’ of social media companies (Buckingham, 2009b) and there are real practical and ethical problems in working out exactly how regulation would happen. Governments do not know what to do.

Lacking any obvious alternative, media information literacy is often seen as the solution: can’t we ‘fact check and moderate our way out of this conundrum’ (boyd, 2018)? danah boyd’s stark response is, no, this will fail. It’s an inadequate solution to an oversimplified problem (Buckingham, 2019a).

Along with boyd and Buckingham, I’m not trying to argue that we drop media information literacy activities from educational (including ELT) programmes. Quite the opposite. But if we want our students to think reflectively, rationally and reasonably, I think we will need to start by doing the same.

References

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