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

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

Benesch, S. (1999). Thinking critically, thinking dialogically. TESOL Quarterly, 33: pp. 573 – 580

Bouygues, H. L. (2019). Fighting Fake News: Lessons From The Information Wars. Reboot Foundation https://reboot-foundation.org/fighting-fake-news/

boyd, d. (2018). You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You? Data and Society: Points https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2

Buckingham, D. (2019a). Teaching Media in a ‘Post-Truth’ Age: Fake News, Media Bias and the Challenge for Media Literacy Education. Cultura y Educación 31(2): pp. 1-19

Buckingham, D. (2019b). Rethinking digital literacy: Media education in the age of digital capitalism. https://ddbuckingham.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/media-education-in-digital-capitalism.pdf

Bulger, M. & Davidson, P. (2018). The Promises, Challenges and Futures of Media Literacy. Data and Society. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_Media_Literacy_2018.pdf

Doctorow, C. (2017). Three kinds of propaganda, and what to do about them. boingboing 25^th February 2017, https://boingboing.net/2017/02/25/counternarratives-not-fact-che.html

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

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

Facione, P. A. (2000). The disposition toward critical thinking: Its character, measurement, and relation to critical thinking skill. Informal Logic, 20(1), 61–84.

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

Guess, A. M., Lerner, M., Lyons, B., Montgomery, J. M., Nyhan, N., Reifler, J. & Sircar, N. (2020). A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jul 2020, 117 (27) 15536-15545; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1920498117

Hajhosseiny, M. (2012). The Effect of Dialogic Teaching on Students’ Critical Thinking Disposition. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 69: pp. 1358 – 1368

Huguet, A., Kavanagh, J., Baker, G. & Blumenthal, M. S. (2019). Exploring Media Literacy Education as a Tool for Mitigating Truth Decay. RAND Corporation, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3000/RR3050/RAND_RR3050.pdf

Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2005). Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Medicine 2 (8): e124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Jeong, S. H., Cho, H., & Hwang, Y. (2012). Media literacy interventions: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Communication, 62, pp. 454–472

Jones-Jang, S. M., Mortensen, T. & Liu, J. (2019). Does media literacy help identification of fake news? Information literacy helps, but other literacies don’t. American Behavioral Scientist, pp. 1 – 18, doi:10.1177/0002764219869406

Jost, J. T., van der Linden, S., Panagopoulos, C. & Hardin, C. D. (2018). Ideological asymmetries in conformity, desire for shared reality, and the spread of misinformation. Current Opinion in Psychology, 23: pp/ 77-83. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.01.003

Kavanagh, J. & Rich, M. D. (2018). Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life. RAND Corporation, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html

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

Menz, C., Spinath, B. & Seifried, E. (2020). Misconceptions die hard: prevalence and reduction of wrong beliefs in topics from educational psychology among preservice teachers. European Journal of Psychology of Education https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-020-00474-5

Milosevic, O. (2020). Promoting critical thinking in the EFL classroom. In Mavridi, S. & Xerri, D. (Eds.) English for 21st Century Skills. Newbury, Berks.: Express Publishing. pp.17 – 22

Morozov, E. (2017). Moral panic over fake news hides the real enemy – the digital giants. The Guardian, 8 January 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/08/blaming-fake-news-not-the-answer-democracy-crisis

Mulnix, J.W. 2010. ‘Thinking critically about critical thinking’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2010

Paul, R. W. (1992). Critical thinking: What, why, and how? New Directions for Community Colleges, 77: pp. 3–24.

Roozenbeek, J., Schneider, C.R., Dryhurst, S., Kerr, J., Freeman, A. L. J., Recchia, G., van der Bles, A. M. & and van der Linden, S. (2020). Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world. Royal Society Open Science, 7 (10) https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201199

Stanley, M., Barr, N., Peters, K. & Seli, P. (2020). Analytic-thinking predicts hoax beliefs and helping behaviors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. PsyArxiv Preprints doi:10.31234/osf.io/m3vt

Ur, P. (2020). Critical Thinking. In Mavridi, S. & Xerri, D. (Eds.) English for 21st Century Skills. Newbury, Berks.: Express Publishing. pp.9 – 16

Willingham, D. T. (2007). Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? American Educator Summer 2007: pp. 8 – 19

Critical data literacy #3: learning / teaching resources

In the last post, I mentioned a lesson plan from an article by Pegrum, M., Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. (2018. Digital literacies revisited. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 7 (2), pp. 3-24) in which students discuss the data that is collected by fitness apps and the possibility of using this data to calculate health insurance premiums, before carrying out and sharing online research about companies that track personal data. It’s a nice plan, unfortunately pay-walled, but you could try requesting a copy through Research Gate.

The only other off-the-shelf lesson plan I have been able to find is entitled ‘You and Your Data’ from the British Council. Suitable for level B2, this plan, along with a photocopiable pdf, contains with a vocabulary task (matching), a reading text (you and your data, who uses our data and why, can you protect your data) with true / false and sentence completion tasks) and a discussion (what do you do to protect our data). The material was written to coincide with Safer Internet Day (an EU project), which takes place in early February (next data 9 February 2021). The related website, Better Internet for Kids, contains links to a wide range of educational resources for younger learners.

For other resources, a good first stop is Ina Sander’s ‘A Critically Commented Guide to Data Literacy Tools’ in which she describes and evaluates a wide range of educational online resources for developing critical data literacy. Some of the resources that I discuss below are also evaluated in this guide. Here are some suggestion for learning / teaching resources.

A glossary

This is simply a glossary of terms that are useful in discussing data issues. It could easily be converted into a matching exercise or flashcards.

critical-data-literacy-glossaryDownload

A series of interactive videos

‘Do not Track’ is an award-winning series of interactive videos, produced by a consortium of broadcasters. In seven parts, the videos consider such issues as who profits from the personal data that we generate online, the role of cookies in the internet economy, how online profiling is done, the data generated by mobile phones and how algorithms interpret the data.

Each episode is between 5 and 10 minutes long, and is therefore ideal for asynchronous viewing. In a survey of critical data literacy tools (Sander, 2020), ‘Do not Track’ proved popular with the students who used it. I highly recommend it, but students will probably need a B2 level or higher.

More informational videos

If you do not have time to watch the ‘Do Not Track’ video series, you may want to use something shorter. There are a huge number of freely available videos about online privacy. I have selected just two which I think would be useful. You may be able to find something better!

1 Students watch a video about how cookies work. This video, from Vox, is well-produced and is just under 7 minutes long. The speaker speaks fairly rapidly, so captions may be helpful.

Students watch a video as an introduction to the topic of surveillance and privacy. This video, ‘Reclaim our Privacy’, was produced by ‘La Quadrature du Net’, a French advocacy group that promotes digital rights and freedoms of citizens. It is short (3 mins) and can be watched with or without captions (English or 6 other languages). Its message is simple: political leaders should ensure that our online privacy is respected.

A simple matching task ‘ten principles for online privacy’

1 Share the image below with all the students and ask them to take a few minutes matching the illustrations to the principles on the right. There is no need for anyone to write or say anything, but it doesn’t matter if some students write the answers in the chat box.

(Note: This image and the other ideas for this activity are adapted from https://teachingprivacy.org/ , a project developed by the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California-Berkeley for secondary school students and undergraduates. Each of the images corresponds to a course module, which contains a wide-range of materials (videos, readings, discussions, etc.) which you may wish to explore more fully.)

2 Share the image below (which shows the answers in abbreviated form). Ask if anyone needs anything clarified.

You’re Leaving Footprints Principle: Your information footprint is larger than you think.

There’s No Anonymity Principle: There is no anonymity on the Internet.

Information Is Valuable Principle: Information about you on the Internet will be used by somebody in their interest — including against you.

Someone Could Listen Principle: Communication over a network, unless strongly encrypted, is never just between two parties.

Sharing Releases Control Principle: Sharing information over a network means you give up control over that information — forever.

Search Is Improving Principle: Just because something can’t be found today, doesn’t mean it can’t be found tomorrow.

Online Is Real Principle: The online world is inseparable from the “real” world.

Identity Isn’t Guaranteed Principle: Identity is not guaranteed on the Internet.

You Can’t Escape Principle: You can’t avoid having an information footprint by not going online.

Privacy Requires Work Principle: Only you have an interest in maintaining your privacy.

3 Wrap up with a discussion of these principles.

Hands-on exploration of privacy tools

Click on the link below to download the procedure for the activity, as well as supporting material.

hands-on-exploration-of-privacy-toolsDownload

A graphic novel

Written by Michael Keller and Josh Neufeld, and produced by Al Jazeera, this graphic novel ‘Terms of Service. Understanding our role in the world of Big Data’ provides a good overview of critical data literacy issues, offering lots of interesting, concrete examples of real cases. The language is, however, challenging (C1+). It may be especially useful for trainee teachers.

A website

The Privacy International website is an extraordinary goldmine of information and resources. Rather than recommending anything specific, my suggestion is that you, or your students, use the ‘Search’ function on the homepage and see where you end up.

Critical data literacy #2: why and what?

In the first post in this 3-part series, I focussed on data collection practices in a number of ELT websites, as a way of introducing ‘critical data literacy’. Here, I explore the term in more detail.

Although the term ‘big data’ has been around for a while (see this article and infographic) it’s less than ten years ago that it began to enter everyday language, and found its way into the OED (2013). In the same year, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier published their best-selling ‘Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think’ (2013) and it was hard to avoid enthusiastic references in the media to the transformative potential of big data in every sector of society.

Since then, the use of big data and analytics has become ubiquitous. Massive data collection (and data surveillance) has now become routine and companies like Palantir, which specialise in big data analytics, have become part of everyday life. Palantir’s customers include the LAPD, the CIA, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the British Government. Its recent history includes links with Cambridge Analytica, assistance in an operation to arrest the parents of illegal migrant children, and a racial discrimination lawsuit where the company was accused of having ‘routinely eliminated’ Asian job applicants (settled out of court for $1.7 million).

Unsurprisingly, the datafication of society has not gone entirely uncontested. Whilst the vast majority of people seem happy to trade their personal data for convenience and connectivity, a growing number are concerned about who benefits most from this trade-off. On an institutional level, the EU introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which led to Google being fined Ꞓ50 million for insufficient transparency in their privacy policy and their practices of processing personal data for the purposes of behavioural advertising. In the intellectual sphere, there has been a recent spate of books that challenge the practices of ubiquitous data collection, coining new terms like ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘digital capitalism’ and ‘data colonialism’. Here are four recent books that I have found particularly interesting.

Beer, D. (2019). The Data Gaze. London: Sage

Couldry, N. & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The Costs of Connection. Stanford: Stanford University Press

Sadowski, J. (2020). Too Smart. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Public Affairs

The use of big data and analytics in education is also now a thriving industry, with its supporters claiming that these technologies can lead to greater personalization, greater efficiency of instruction and greater accountability. Opponents (myself included) argue that none of these supposed gains have been empirically demonstrated, and that the costs to privacy, equity and democracy outweigh any potential gains. There is a growing critical literature and useful, recent books include:

Bradbury, A. & Roberts-Holmes, G. (2018). The Datafication of Primary and Early Years Education. Abingdon: Routledge

Jarke, J. & Breiter, A. (Eds.) (2020). The Datafication of Education. Abingdon: Routledge

Williamson, B. (2017). Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice. London: Sage

Concomitant with the rapid growth in the use of digital tools for language learning and teaching, and therefore the rapid growth in the amount of data that learners were (mostly unwittingly) giving away, came a growing interest in the need for learners to develop a set of digital competencies, or literacies, which would enable them to use these tools effectively. In the same year that Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier brought out their ‘Big Data’ book, the first book devoted to digital literacies in English language teaching came out (Dudeney et al., 2013). They defined digital literacies as the individual and social skills needed to effectively interpret, manage, share and create meaning in the growing range of digital communication channels (Dudeney et al., 2013: 2). The book contained a couple of activities designed to raise students’ awareness of online identity issues, along with others intended to promote critical thinking about digitally-mediated information (what the authors call ‘information literacy’), but ‘critical literacy’ was missing from the authors’ framework.

Critical thinking and critical literacy are not the same thing. Although there is no generally agreed definition of the former (with a small ‘c’), it is focussed primarily on logic and comprehension (Lee, 2011). Paul Dummett and John Hughes (2019: 4) describe it as ‘a mindset that involves thinking reflectively, rationally and reasonably’. The prototypical critical thinking activity involves the analysis of a piece of fake news (e.g. the task where students look at a website about tree octopuses in Dudeney et al. 2013: 198 – 203). Critical literacy, on the other hand, involves standing back from texts and technologies and viewing them as ‘circulating within a larger social and textual context’ (Warnick, 2002). Consideration of the larger social context necessarily entails consideration of unequal power relationships (Leee, 2011; Darvin, 2017), such as that between Google and the average user of Google. And it follows from this that critical literacy has a socio-political emancipatory function.

Critical digital literacy is now a growing field of enquiry (e.g. Pötzsch, 2019) and there is an awareness that digital competence frameworks, such as the Digital Competence Framework of the European Commission, are incomplete and out of date without the inclusion of critical digital literacy. Dudeney et al (2013) clearly recognise the importance of including critical literacy in frameworks of digital literacies. In Pegrum et al. (2018, unfortunately paywalled), they update the framework from their 2013 book, and the biggest change is the inclusion of critical literacy. They divide this into the following:

• critical digital literacy – closely related to information literacy
• critical mobile literacy – focussing on issues brought to the fore by mobile devices, ranging from protecting privacy through to safeguarding mental and physical health
• critical material literacy – concerned with the material conditions underpinning the use of digital technologies, ranging from the socioeconomic influences on technological access to the environmental impacts of technological manufacturing and disposal
• critical philosophical literacy – concerned with the big questions posed to and about humanity as our lives become conjoined with the existence of our smart devices, robots and AI
• critical academic literacy, which refers to the pressing need to conduct meaningful studies of digital technologies in place of what is at times ‘cookie-cutter’ research

I’m not entirely convinced by the subdivisions, but labelling in this area is still in its infancy. My particular interest here, in critical data literacy, seems to span across a number of their sub-divisions. And the term that I am using, ‘critical data literacy’, which I’ve taken from Tygel & Kirsch (2016), is sometimes referred to as ‘critical big data literacy’ (Sander, 2020a) or ‘personal data literacy’ (Pangrazio & Selwyn, 2019). Whatever it is called, it is the development of ‘informed and critical stances toward how and why [our] data are being used’ (Pangrazio & Selwyn, 2018). One of the two practical activities in the Pegrum at al article (2018) looks at precisely this area (the task requires students to consider the data that is collected by fitness apps). It will be interesting to see, when the new edition of the ‘Digital Literacies’ book comes out (perhaps some time next year), how many other activities take a more overtly critical stance.

In the next post, I’ll be looking at a range of practical activities for developing critical data literacy in the classroom. This involves both bridging the gaps in knowledge (about data, algorithms and online privacy) and learning, practically, how to implement ‘this knowledge for a more empowered internet usage’ (Sander, 2020b).

Without wanting to invalidate the suggestions in the next post, a word of caution is needed. Just as critical thinking activities in the ELT classroom cannot be assumed to lead to any demonstrable increase in critical thinking (although there may be other benefits to the activities), activities to promote critical literacy cannot be assumed to lead to any actual increase in critical literacy. The reaction of many people may well be ‘It’s not like it’s life or death or whatever’ (Pangrazio & Selwyn, 2018). And, perhaps, education is rarely, if ever, a solution to political and social problems, anyway. And perhaps, too, we shouldn’t worry too much about educational interventions not leading to their intended outcomes. Isn’t that almost always the case? But, with those provisos in mind, I’ll come back next time with some practical ideas.

REFERENCES

Darvin R. (2017). Language, Ideology, and Critical Digital Literacy. In: Thorne S., May S. (eds) Language, Education and Technology. Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd ed.). Springer, Cham. pp. 17 – 30 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02237-6_35

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

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

Lee, C. J. (2011). Myths about critical literacy: What teachers need to unlearn. Journal of Language and Literacy Education [Online], 7 (1), 95-102. Available at http://www.coa.uga.edu/jolle/2011_1/lee.pdf

Mayer-Schönberger, V. & Cukier, K. (2013). Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. London: John Murray

Pangrazio, L. & Selwyn, N. (2018). ‘It’s not like it’s life or death or whatever’: young people’s understandings of social media data. Social Media + Society, 4 (3): pp. 1–9. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2056305118787808

Pangrazio, L. & Selwyn, N. (2019). ‘Personal data literacies’: A critical literacies approach to enhancing understandings of personal digital data. New Media and Society, 21 (2): pp. 419 – 437

Pegrum, M., Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. (2018). Digital literacies revisited. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 7 (2), pp. 3-24

Pötzsch, H. (2019). Critical Digital Literacy: Technology in Education Beyond Issues of User Competence and Labour-Market Qualifications. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 17: pp. 221 – 240 Available at https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1093

Sander, I. (2020a). What is critical big data literacy and how can it be implemented? Internet Policy Review, 9 (2). DOI: 10.14763/2020.2.1479 https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/218936/1/2020-2-1479.pdf

Sander, I. (2020b). Critical big data literacy tools – Engaging citizens and promoting empowered internet usage. Data & Policy, 2: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/dap.2020.5

Tygel, A. & Kirsch, R. (2016). Contributions of Paulo Freire for a Critical Data Literacy: a Popular Education Approach. The Journal of Community Informatics, 12 (3). Available at http://www.ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1296

Warnick, B. (2002). Critical Literacy in a Digital Era. Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates