Investigating digital language/media practices, awareness, and pedagogy: Introduction

Abstract

This Special Issue, initiated in July 2017 at the 18th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA) in Rio de Janeiro and completed in the summer of 2020 amidst the Covid-19 crisis, brings together researchers based in Asia, Australia and Europe with a background in applied and sociolinguistics and extensive expertise on digital language, communication and literacy. Based on original research, the six articles in this Special Issue examine the relationship between digital language practices and critical awareness of language and digital media, and explore how insights in everyday practices and understandings of digital communication may inform language pedagogy in a digital age. Although the research they report is neither carried out in schools nor concerned with institutional learning processes, it remains education-relevant as authors investigate informal, extra-institutional digital language and communication among adolescent and young adult informants, most of whom still participate in institutional education at secondary or tertiary level. Table 1 provides an overview of sites, participants, and data sources for the six articles. The following brief introduction outlines three themes that all articles address: (a) the intricate bound of language and media in a digital era, (b) the need for a specifically digital approach to critical language/media awareness, and (c) implications of this research for digital language/media pedagogy. Table 1 Overview of contributions (in order of appearance in the Special Issue). Table 1 Article Site Participants Data Sources M.G. Sindoni, ‘Mode-switching in video-mediated interaction’ Italy Italian postgraduate students interacting with L1 English speakers Skype video calls and multimodal transcriptions J. Androutsopoulos & F. Busch, ‘Digital punctuation as an interactional resource’ Germany Secondary school students, aged 13—18 WhatsApp logfiles, complementary in-person interviews S. Sultana & S. Dovchin, ‘Relocalization in digital language practices of university students in Asian peripheries’ Bandladesh and Mongolia University students, aged 17—25 Participant Facebook profiles C. Tagg & P. Seargeant, ‘Context design and critical language/media awareness’ UK Facebook users, aged 22—45 In-person interviews A. Georgakopoulou, ‘Designing stories on social media’ English-language media News articles on Snapchat and Instagram Stories R.H. Jones, ‘The text is reading you’ Hong Kong and UK University students In-person and online interviews, blog discussions 1 Investigating digital language/media practices: levels of granularity The ongoing digitalisation of society on a global scale (Lundby, 2014) brings about far-reaching consequences for language and literacy practices. In the first two decades of the 21st century, digital literacy gained importance in all areas of private and professional practice. In many parts of the world today, a wide range of everyday activities depend on algorithm-based web services, with social interaction by means of networked mobile devices being commonplace. New patterns of interpersonal and professional communication are in particular adopted by adolescents and young adults, who lead all age cohorts in the frequency of online communication, as repeatedly attested by media research on an international scale, and whose non-institutional practices of digital writing, composing, remixing and interacting are found to blur boundaries between institutional and vernacular literacies (e.g., Herring & Androutsopoulos, 2015; Iorio, 2016; Jones, Chik & Hafner, 2015). The six articles in this SI investigate these new practices at different levels of granularity. Three articles operate at a narrow level of granularity, where analytic attention is paid to surface features of digital interaction and connections are drawn between linguistic resources that are mobilized in digital interaction and the affordances of the underlying technologies. In her article on “Mode-switching in video-mediated interaction”, Maria Grazia Sindoni examines the practice and process of mode-switching, a recently popular practice of switching between speaking and typing in applications that afford simultaneous use of both language modalities. Drawing on a corpus of video-calls by postgraduate students (who also transcribed the data and reflected on their multimodal transcriptions in the context of a university project), Sindoni's article documents a range of creative interactional functions of mode-switching between speaking and texting on the same video-call platform. In their article on “Digital punctuation as an interactional resource”, Jannis Androutsopoulos and Florian Busch examine how secondary school students in Germany use punctuation in informal messaging. Focusing on one rarely used, but highly salient punctuation sign, the message-final period, they examine how this sign undergoes a process of pragmaticalization, i.e. a gain of pragmatic functions at the expense of syntactic ones, and how it thereby comes to contextualize, and become reflexively enregistered with, communicative distance and institutional communication. Shaila Sultana and Sender Dovchin, in their article on “Relocalization in digital language practices of university students in Asian peripheries”, present data from a digital ethnography project with university students in Bangladesh and Mongolia. A close analysis of data from Facebook profile pages shows how these students engage in multilingual practices and recontextualize (relocalize, in the authors’ own term) linguistic features from various languages and sources, thereby positioning themselves in independent, emancipatory and resistant ways towards power regimes in their respective societies. The other three articles operate at a broader level of granularity. They shift focus away from linguistic/multimodal resources at a surface level and towards the a of narratives and ideologies that shape the experience and awareness of digital media users. Even though microlinguistic analysis is also part of this approach (see Georgakopoulou's use of corpus-linguistics techniques), the main interest here is on the tension between the power of corporations in designing and preconfiguring media ecologies, on the one hand, and responses by users whose awareness of software constraints and affordances becomes crucial in shaping their own semiotic actions, on the other. In their article on “Context design and critical language/media awareness”, Caroline Tagg and Philip Seargeant draw on interviews with Facebook users to investigate how they perceive the contextual constraints that Facebook sets up and design the context of their own communication through their decisions on whether, what, and how to post. In her article, “Designing stories on social media”, Alexandra Georgakopoulou casts a corpus-assisted, critical perspective on media reports about the Story feature of Instagram and Snapchat. She examines how the primordial mode of storytelling is reconfigured (‘designed’) into an app feature that in turn forms the template of mass-scale digital storytelling among (predominantly younger) users, and identifies tensions that arise between the marketing of these app features and their actual affordances for semiotic practice. The tension between corporate prefabrication and user awareness and agency is further explored by Rodney H. Jones in his contribution, “The text is reading you: teaching language in the age of the algorithm”, where he draws on interviews and other forms of documentation among university students to examine how they reflect about the ways algorithms influence digital communication, how they themselves conceptualize algorithms (which Jones classifies in six metaphors), and how they attempt to trick out their workings to their own personal benefit. Together, these six articles move back and forth between broader and narrower levels of structural and contextual granularity in digital communication, i.e., between the multimodal resources people mobilize to do digital text and talk and the knowledge and ideologies that shape their experience and action as digital media users. 2 Critical language/media awareness in a digital age All of the articles in this SI explore the intricate bond between language and media at the levels of practice, product, and critical awareness. They draw on Critical language awareness (CLA), which emerged in the 1990s as a research field at the interface of applied and sociolinguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, and New Literacy Studies. Drawing on research and institutional interventions, CLA aims to make speakers aware of indexical differences in language, the social stratification of language varieties, the unequal way different registers of communication index social power relations, and the use of discourse as a means for social change (Alim, 2010; Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; Fairclough, 1992). Some articles also draw on Critical Media Awareness, an academic field that started out by developing critical readings of (audiovisua) media content, media representations, and grassroots media production (Kellner & Share, 2005), and more recently encourages critical understandings of digital communication in a social, political, and economic perspective (e.g., boyd & Crawford, 2012; Kellner & Kim, 2010; Kitchin, 2017). Even though scholarship on critical awareness of language and media has developed separately by discipline (linguistics and media studies, respectively), the articles in the Special Issue support a joint perspective on ‘language/media’ with regard to exploring communicative practice and awareness. The main reason for this is quite simple. In a digital era, the selection and production of linguistic signs is tightly enmeshed with co-occurring selections of media devices and platforms or applications for the production of utterances and discourses. Stylistic choices, in the widest sense of the term, therefore orient not only to individual or imagined audiences, but also to media applications that are enregistered with specific types of addressees and situations (Busch, 2018). For example, when it comes to punctuation signs, school students reflect on pragmatic functions of the period (as discussed by Androutsopoulos and Busch in this issue) specifically with regard to informal communication via messenger. Their awareness of period usage is completely different when it comes to writing an email to a teacher, let alone for their handwritten school essays. Likewise, the contributions by Sindoni as well as Sultana and Dovchin reveal language practices and awareness that are specifically valid for particular platforms of online interaction (video-conferencing software and social networking, respectively) rather than for written language as such or for private vs. public communication in general. Tagg and Seargeant show in their article that social networking users build on their understanding of the algorithmic mechanisms of the formation of digital publics in order to design the context of their contributions. In the ‘algorithmic pragmatics’ approach advocated by Jones, social media users conceptualize algorithms in certain ways with regard to their workings in particular software environments, such as an online shopping or music streaming platform. Thus, the articles in this Special Issue suggest we need to think beyond an apparent divide between language and digital media in terms of communicative practice and metapragmatic awareness. We need to find ways to research and theorize their convergence and interplay. This language/media approach gains momentum when articles discuss ‘folk algorithmics’ (Jones), ‘critical media-narrative awareness’ (Georgakopoulou), or a ‘critical language/media awareness’ (Tagg and Seargeant) that aims to understand how people make sense of the tension between what is preconfigured (by algorithms and/or corporate design decisions and marketing strategies) and what might be creatively shaped, and how their understandings of this tension shape whether, what, and how they communicate online. 3 Implications for language pedagogy One idea that underpins this Special Issue is that out-of-school practices, skills and understandings of digital language and communication are, in principle, transferable to institutional language education, and that such transfer might be beneficial. The notion that building on students’ out-of-school practices can support the teaching of critical language and media awareness has been put forward by scholars such as Gee (2007) and Knobel and Lankshear (2008). Our interest in the implications of our research for language pedagogy is in the spirit of Cope and Kalantzis (2009), whose multi-literacies approach is grounded on bringing together “what was happening in the world of communications” with “the teaching of language and literacy in schools” (2009: 164). This line of thinking has been part of conversations in Linguistics & Education (Cekaite & Bjork-Willen, 2018; Duran, 2017; Fernández-Fontecha, O’Halloran, Wignell, & Tan, 2020; Lacasa, Martínez & Méndez, 2008; McGinnis, Goodstein-Stolzenberg & Saliani, 2007; Rothoni, 2017), and has been taken up in foreign language teaching and learning, for example with regard to expanding the scope of EFL writing pedagogy by encompassing vernacular uses of English in various youth cultures (e.g., Kim, 2018; Schreiber, 2015; Shepard-Carey, 2020). This line of scholarship must be distinguished from the thriving research field on computer-supported language learning and teaching (CALL, e.g., Dooly & O’ Dowd, 2012; Guth & Helm, 2010). CALL research examines a wide range of practices and arrangements for language teaching and learning with digital technologies, including provision of digital content, testing and assessing, organizing tandems, and other cross-linguistic learning activities. None of the articles here engage with CALL research. Our interest rather lies in a critical digital language/media pedagogy that brings to the fore out-of-school practices that often go unnoticed and unappreciated by educators. It is worthwhile to set this interest in the context of broader attempts towards a sociolinguistically inclusive language pedagogy, thereby integrating language variation and language varieties into curricular content, overcoming language-ideological binaries and limitations, and legitimizing multiple ways of using language in society. So, while the broader idea of introducing vernacular voices and genres into the curriculum is by no means new, in the digital era it finds new fields of application and new semiotic configurations, notably with regard to multimodality and transmedia. Together, the articles in this Special Issue propose a perspective on digital language and media pedagogy that entails a critical examination of standard language ideology and of the primacy of language as an autonomous system of meaning-making. Each article contributes to this approach with a different suggestion. Sultana and Dovchin align with literature on foreign language teaching and learning, which advocates integrating vernacular uses of English to expand the scope of EFL writing pedagogy (e.g., Rothoni, 2017; Schreiber, 2015), and argue that students’ transmodal and translingual practices be considered in EFL teaching. Sindoni emphasizes the potential of multimodality for student self-expression, which counterbalances a sole reliance on language for practices of self-expression and interaction (see also Duran, 2017; McGinnis et al., 2007; Schreiber, 2015; Sultana, 2014). Androutsopoulos and Busch cast a critical perspective on the way German language textbooks frame language use online, often reducing it to a special vocabulary or jargon (cf., Kiesendahl, 2015) and eventually sustaining standard language ideologies. On the example of punctuation, they argue that the inclusion of informal digital literacy and metapragmatic awareness into punctuation teaching may promote attention to communicative functions of punctuation signs rather than the now-prevailing normative approach on the linguistic forms themselves. Tagg and Seargeant advocate a ‘social digital literacies education’, which aims to build on and enhance people's understanding of the complexities of online interactions. They argue that enhancing language/media literacy requires understanding how people make sense of online interaction, and how this awareness shapes the type and nature of their communication via social media. For Jones, an important task for language pedagogy in the age of the algorithm is to raise critical awareness on how algorithmic processes determine aspects of digital communication and interactivity, especially in terms of what is made available to us as an option to consume, i.e. listen, read, watch, purchase. Georgakopoulou, too, advocates a critical perspective on social-media stories, uncovering mismatches between the corporate marketing of story-telling apps, these apps’ affordances and their users’ actual communicative practices. I conclude with an observation from my own teaching experience during the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring term of 2020. The pandemic makes us aware of the far-reaching implications of digital media for education, a point extensively discussed by Alice Chik and Phil Benson in their Commentary for this SI. Practically all teaching during the early months of the pandemic has depended on digital platforms and especially video conferencing software (such as Zoom), and so did all attempts of educators to network and jointly reflect on their practices and solutions for remote teaching. These solutions depend, on the one hand, on top-down regulations, some taken in haste and without consultations with practitioners themselves. On the other hand, they also crucially depend on digital skills that participants bring along to computer-based, video-mediated teaching in times of crisis. In Hamburg, for example, we eventually settled for a combination of synchronous and asynchronous modes for all university courses during the spring 2020 term. The asynchronous component is based on various digital blackboard systems that students and staff are already familiar with. The synchronous portion draws on video-conferencing and webinar software, especially Zoom, in order to simulate classroom interaction. This was entirely unprecedented in terms of an institution-wide regulation, and its swift implementation in a very short time span caught quite a few members of academic staff by surprise. I soon realized, however, that many of my students somehow seemed to be at ease with video interaction. They operated the platform smoothly, effortlessly switching their cameras and mics on and off, depending on the ongoing activity, and even introduced Zoom affordances such as reaction emojis and chatting into the workings of the digital classroom. No one taught them these skills at university. Rather, they mobilized non-institutional experiences with video interaction, such as skyping with families and friends, and adapted them to cope a bit more efficiently during the crisis. This is offered as a vivid example for an important point this SI aims to make: out-of-school digital skills are transferrable, and research can help identify these skills and understand how they can be transferred into educational institutions.