An Approach to Creative Media Literacy for World Issues

This article introduces an approach to creative media literacy for world issues (WIs) such as Covid-19. In so doing, the article integrates four positions on discourse and media as terrible facets of globalization in the context of critical discourse analysis (CDA). The objectivist position deals with WIs as neutral discourse shared among humanity and distributed through English as an international language and educational media. The ideologist position treats creative media literacy as relations of power between global and local identities in the form of competing discourses associated with WIs. The rhetoric position reveals the hidden strategies used in global media discourse and English as a global language. The social constructionist position provides three levels of analysis for creative media literacy among university students: textual analysis, discourse analysis, and critical discourse analysis. The article concludes with guidelines on how lecturers can implement this approach with EFL students

Competences in digital online media literacy: Towards convergence with emergency remote EFL learning

Copyright © 2020 by Academic Publishing House Researcher s.r.o. With the emergency shift to remote learning due to the spread of COVID-19 and the advent of communication technology, developing digital online media literacy (DOML) has become necessary for Saudi English as foreign language (EFL) students. Media literacy empowers EFL students to access, analyze, evaluate, and produce digital online media texts. The preparatory year (PY) is a bridging year that links school outcomes to university demands. This study examines the competences in DOML among students in PY at Saudi University. It also examines whether any differences can be attributed to gender. To accomplish this, a four-dimensional survey of 36 items was adapted from T. Hallaq\u27s (Hallaq, 2016) to serve EFL context. The simple sample consisted of 170 respondents (85 males and 85 females). The results showed that the respondents are competent in DOML (m=3.73), and that there were no statistical differences between females and males. This result indicates that the respondents are ready for the emergency remote learning. Both males and females are subject to the same homogeneous educational system. The paper concludes with some pedagogical implications for emergency remote EFL learning

Fostering Critical Intercultural Awareness Among EFL Students Through Critical Discourse Analysis

This paper reports some findings on the development of critical intercultural awareness among English-as-a-foreign-language students in the context of a critical reading enrichment course for students in the preparatory year at a Saudi university. The critical reading class aimed to increase levels of critical intercultural awareness among the participants when they decoded and encoded an intercultural text. A qualitative action research design was used. The teacher-researcher equipped the participants with tools from critical discourse analysis for analyzing intercultural texts. After that, they were asked to work on an assignment by reading a text about a dinner invitation and then writing creatively on that topic. The study data were collected from these reflective writings in the participants’ portfolios. The teacher-researcher also used tools of critical discourse analysis to analyze the collected data. It was found that the participants demonstrated a balanced intercultural awareness associated with the discourse of food diversity. They also effectively appreciated cultures of the self and others and demonstrated appropriate intercultural knowledge of the self and others. Furthermore, they acquired the intercultural skills of relating to intercultural texts, as well as analyzing and interpreting them. The study suggests the effectiveness of critical discourse analysis as a teaching and learning strategy to increase critical intercultural awareness among English-as-a-foreign-language students

Discursive legitimation of human values: local-global power relations in global media discourse

Construction of identities can be manifested in the form of competing legitimation discourses over an intercultural issue. This study investigates the power relations between local identities and global identities over the discursive legitimation of human values in global media discourse. Yemen Times (YT) is the most circulated English-language newspaper in Yemen. YT can be voice of Yemen to the world through the use of the English language and the online version of the paper. With the notion of English and globalization, the newspaper published discourses for maxims in the context of Improve Your English series produced by a non-local journalist. A maxim is extended in the form of an argumentative paragraph that contextualizes a single value. Employing an empirical research design, the study data were built of 152 maxims. As a theoretical and analytical approach, Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is concerned with globalization, discourse, power and ideology. The study adopts these concepts to show how the processes of globalization are ideological choices that serve the interest of global agency. After identifying human values through thematic analysis, a three-dimension analysis of discourse was used to reveal the competing legitimation discourses. Clause complex was used as the unit of analysis where the focus was on the social actors of the projecting clauses. The discourse analysis reveals that local identities were suppressed or backgrounded in the texts. Global identities dominated the texts in the form of global literary discourse, global political discourse, global religious discourse, global philosophical discourse and global anonymous discourse. The exclusion of local identities shows that human values were employed in intercultural communication to serve the interest of global hegemony