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Digital literacy practices of Saudi Female university students
This study examines the way young Saudi women use language and other
communicative resources in their digitally mediated interactions. It is motivated by
the debate in Saudi Arabia on the impact of digital media on the way people use
language, especially Arabic, the way they manage their social relationships, and the
way they enact their cultural identities. The study was conducted at a women’s
university in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia. A hundred and three participants were
asked to complete a questionnaire on their online language use. Forty-seven of those
participants were asked to keep a detailed literacy log of their digital practices over
a period of four days and to submit samples of their interactions for closer analysis.
The theoretical framework used to analyze the data combines concepts from new
literacy studies (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Gee & Hayes, 2010; Street, 2003),
multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006; Jewitt, Bezemer, &
O'Halloran, 2016), and mediated discourse analysis (Jones & Norris, 2005; Scollon,
2001). The framework sees people’s language use in terms of social practices and
explores how those practices are affected by the different media people use to
communicate, and how mediated communication is linked to broader issues of
culture and identity.
The analysis reveals that the participants’ digital practices are multimodal and
multilingual, and the choices they make about the codes and modes they use take
place in the context of a complex nexus of practice, involving the interaction among
(i) the affordances and constrains of the different technologies they use, (ii) the
demands of their social relationships, and (iii) their individual experiences and
socialization into different ways of communicating. By appropriating different
codes and modes in different ways in social media, young Saudi women are able to
strategically situate themselves in different cultural ‘worlds’, maintaining traditional
identities and cultural practices while at the same time enacting new kinds of
identities. The study contributes to the debate on the effect of digital media on
language use by adopting a sociocultural approach which links language use to
social practices, social relationships and social identities