Exploring how digital media technologies can foster Saudi EFL students' English language learning

Digital Media Technologies (DMTs) has been inspiring people, especially younger generations, for decades. In education, DMTs usage has been investigated as a learning tool. In recent years, studies have been conducted to examine the affordances of DMTs in the context of learning English as a foreign language (EFL). Research has shown that there is a relationship between DMTs usage and intentional learning, as the latter has been argued to be an important aspect of learning. This study aims to understand high-school students’ use of DMTs for fostering EFL intentional learning, especially outside the classroom in the Saudi context. To achieve this goal, a mixed-method research approach was applied. The quantitative data was collected through an online survey that was distributed to Year 12 Saudi male students (n= 350). The qualitative data was collected with students through two phases: the first phase consisted of semi-structured focus group interviews (n= 24) while the second was an online journal (n= 6). The results have shown that Saudi high-school students were highly engaged with DMTs and intentionally use several types of DMTs for learning purposes

Literacy and multilingualism in Africa

Literacy and multilingualism in Africa is approached here as a field of practice rather than a unified field of research. This field presents a crucial paradox: African contexts present some of the world’s most diverse and vital multilingual situations but also feature in the world’s poorest literacy rates and are routinely said to lack a literate tradition altogether. By reviewing Africa’s script inventions this chapter offers counter-evidence for this deceptive view. Throughout Africa – from the Maghreb over West and Central Africa to the Horn of Africa – there have been significant indigenous script traditions and inventions, including Tifinagh, N’ko, Vai, Bamum and Ge’ez. In fact, some of the world’s oldest known scripts (e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphs) are African scripts. The chapter further outlines two relatively young fields of practice and research that have begun to make major contributions to literacy and multilingualism in Africa: digital literacy and linguistic landscape. These fields share a common interest in the materiality of real language as opposed to idealized images of language and in local agency and creativity in the site of struggle that is language. Like digital language practices, linguistic landscapes constitute a domain for African written multilingualism that is not generally supported or monitored by African states. Nor does either field present simple continuities from colonially inherited language policies and ideologies, in the way that classrooms do. As spaces for writing par excellence linguistic landscapes and mobile phones promise to contribute in no minor way to the development of African language literacies and multilingualism in Africa