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ABSTRACT
Digital literacies are vital in supporting educational, working, personal, social and civic lives in the current era. Five years after the publication of a Framework of Digital Literacies (Dudeney, Hockly, & Pegrum, 2013) which was designed to guide teachers of English and other languages in preparing their students to engage effectively with the communicative, collaborative and creative demands and opportunities of this era, the framework is being used to inform a number of European language learning initiatives. It is timely to revisit and revise the original framework in light of ongoing technological developments (such as the continued rise of mobile technologies, augmented reality and virtual reality interfaces, coding and robotics, big data and learning analytics) and sociopolitical developments (such as increasing superdiversity coupled with a countertrend of resistance to globalisation, and the need in this context for a more critical perspective on our technologies and the information and communication channels they offer). This article further substantiates the original framework in light of recent developments, while extending its existing categories in a Revised Framework that takes into account our evolving context.
KEYWORDS: language, literacy, digital literacies, critical literacy
1.INTRODUCTION
In a superdiverse era, the ability to operate across multiple languages, cultures and modes of communication is in high demand. Notwithstanding a countertrend of resistance to globalisation, evidenced in mounting barriers to the free flow of people and communications, we find ourselves in a time of rising superdiversity, that is, a "diversification of diversity" (Vertovec, 2006, p. 1) with both sociocultural and sociolinguistic ramifications (Androutsopoulos & Juffermans, 2014; Blommaert, 2014; Creese & Blackledge, in press). In a context of physical and digital mobility, people who are diverse in multiple respects - from age, gender, sexuality and race through familial, religious, ethnic, cultural, national and political affiliations to immigration status, education, employment and wealth (e.g., Vertovec, 2006, 2007; Wessendorf, 2010) - are interacting in linguistically mixed ways in both offline urban spaces and online social spaces. Moreover, these real and virtual spaces are progressively interpenetrating each other, so that "the strange new forms of literacy crawling through the internet" (Blommaert, 2015, p. 83) are also permeating our everyday smartphone-enabled lives. A premium is thus placed on the literacies needed to communicate effectively across face-to-face, digital and...