Digital Literacy: A Critical Framework for Digital Literacy Practices in Classrooms

The digital revolution has changed the nature of information-seeking and retrieval. Carnoy and Castells (2001) refer to the Internet as the fabric of our lives. Generations have grown up being exposed to a variety of digital formats, and roles are reversed, with learners becoming teachers, given that they interact naturally with social media and networking. How do we make sense of a whole new generation we are currently teaching? From a sociocultural view, literacy is a matter of social practices, not simply a matter of encoding and decoding script. Against the growing convergence of media, and the broader context of education in South Africa, this paper motivates for critical engagement with digital texts in the English classroom. Thereafter I provide a framework for critical engagement based on Buckingham’s (2003; 2007) concepts: representation, language, production and audience.