It is now widely recognised that language teachers have a responsibility to help students develop the skills necessary to read the world and not just the word (Alvermann 2004, viii) and to progress towards becoming designers of meaning across proficiencies (Kern 2000; Allen & Paesani 2010) and across languages. One way to achieve this is by engaging students in participatory and interactive learning experiences which aim at critically discussing taboo and controversial topics (Boyd & Darragh 2019; Dail, Witte, & Bickmore 2018) through combining the power of Young Adult Literature (YAL) with that of digital tools. In this context, digital social reading, which is "the act of sharing one's thoughts about a text with the help of tools such as social media networks and collaborative annotation" (Blyth 2014, 205) has gained momentum as the new literacy practice able to bridge the gap between print and digital cultures. However, research on digital social reading in second language learning contexts is still scarce.
Starting from these premises and with a view to contribute to the field, we investigated the results of a digital social reading project carried out during the wider Erasmus + project "DigLit - Lit. Up Your Phones: A Digital Toolkit for ESL / EFL Classroom to Combat Social Inequalities in Times of Covid19 Crises", which has involved three universities and three upper secondary schools across Austria, Italy, and Hungary in the period 2021-2023. The project aimed at providing EFL teachers with the tools necessary to promote awareness of global challenges (racism, gender issues, mental health, etc.) through the use of young adult literature in combination with mobile apps.
In this talk, we will present the pedagogical design of the digital social reading project showing how the affordances of the social reading mobile app chosen were exploited to encourage students to empathise with the characters, understand the plot, and share their views and interpretations of the text with other readers. We will also share some of the most interesting findings by discussing to what extent digital social reading fostered students' deep understanding of taboo/controversial topics, their development of EFL multiliteracies skills, and their desire to read.
References
Alvermann, D.E. (2002), Preface. In Bigum, C., Alvermann, D. E., Knobel, M., Lankshear, C., & Peters, M. A. (eds). Adolescents and literacies in a digital world. New York: Peter Lang.
Boyd, A. S., & Darragh, J. J. (2019). Reading for action: Engaging youth in social justice through young adult literature. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Dail, J. S., Witte, S., & Bickmore, S. T. (Eds.). (2018). Young adult literature and the digital world: Textual engagement through visual literacy. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Kern, R. (2000). Literacy and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Willis Allen, H., & Paesani, K. (2010). Exploring the feasibility of a pedagogy of multiliteracies in introductory foreign language courses. L2 Journal, 2(1), 119-142.
