Digital Literacies for Language Learning and Teaching: From a Conceptual Framework to the Design and Development of an Online Portal

Advancing digital literacy among language learners and teachers is, to quote Hicks and Turner (2013), no longer a luxury. As technology is pervading our daily lives, there is still an acute requirement to equip students and language learners more specifically with the digital competencies that will enable them to flourish in a multilingual and multicultural digital environment. In parallel, language teachers need to reinvent their teaching to tie their use and understanding of digital tools to progressive pedagogies. This paper will describe and evaluate an Irish nation-wide project that aims to enhance digital literacies for language learners and teachers, namely digilanguages.ie. Following an initial phase that consisted of identifying key language learning contexts that require digital competencies, a suitable conceptual framework (Dudeney, Hockly, and Pegrum 2013) was identified to underpin the design and development of an online portal. The framework allowed for the integration of digital literacies and the learning of a language in a variety of contexts. One of the key challenges addressed in this paper is the translation of the framework into the design and development of a coherent and integrated resource that will inspire both language learners and teachers so that language learning and teaching will be transformed and adapted to a modern and increasingly complex society. Ensuring sustainability for the resource is at the heart of both the technological infrastructure and the participating institutions’ commitment. Therefore, an iterative consultation process with key stakeholders (through online surveys and face to face discussions) has informed each stage of the design and development of the resource. It aims to strike a balance between allowing learners/teachers to interact with the material according to their preferences while also providing enough guidance for independent language learners/teachers who wish to navigate the often unpredictable multilingual and multicultural exchanges of our modern world (Kramsch and Whiteside 2008).