Landscapes of culture, discourse and language education in the age of ‘new literacies’

The term ‘new literacies’ is now being used primarily to refer to a range of internet-based literacy practices associated with so-called Web 2.0 technologies. It has been argued that these ‘new’ literacies are, in contrast to the ‘old’ print-based literacies, interactive, collaborative and distributed. From the perspective of language education, the recent rapid growth of globalized online spaces for communication using new literacy practices is also of interest. In this presentation, I will discuss data on the use of foreign languages in these spaces, arguing that they offer not only opportunities for authentic foreign language communication, but also new ways of conceptualizing language learning and language use. Using the metaphor of landscape to represent the ways in which culture, discourse and language education interact, I will suggest that one of the main impacts of Web 2.0 technologies is likely to be a reconfiguration of relationships between language learning and use based on a foreshortening of discursive and cultural distances from the perspective of learners who use them.