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What is Digital Literacy?
Digital literacy is a term that everyone may have heard more and more about
over the past few years. Social lives of people and educational settings require some
form of competence in digital literacy. Indeed, it's not only about knowing how to use
technology, but also about integrating methods of teaching and communicating through
different digital media. Digital literacy is really important not only for university
students, it is also needed when a person enters a profession. For instance, people need
a certain level of digital literacy to turn on the computer or to fill up some job
applications or teaching lessons by showing some videos, using websites. Some people
rely on social media forms to communicate with their friends, whereas some people
don't engage with it and they apply to social media for knowing the latest news. While
others use it for educational purposes.
In one video there is said that being a digitally literate students means having
capabilities in 5 connected areas:
They need to be able to search, navigate and locate informations in
digital platforms;
After finding information it's time to evaluate, analyze and apply
critical thinking skills to check;
Organise, manage and curate the information they've found;
Being able to create, construct and generate digital artifacts and
digital identity;
They should also able to communicate, connect and collaborate
with others
Being capable in digital literacy is a great thing, because it may be a key to
people's success both at university and in your future career.
Usage of technologies in EFL classes
Nowadays, in the century of developed technologies more pedagogical
methods are changing into the interesting gamify learning. People of this era are so
lucky to be living in a digital society where they can find lots of useful tools for learning
language.
Therefore, social media plays a very important role in EFL(English as a foreign
language) classes.
There are so many programs which students can use for educational purposes.
For instance, the program DuoLingo teaches the languages with a variety of games. By
this gaming technique students can remember the words and they can get the
opportunity to construct knowledge.
Moreover, students can learn english or some other languages via watching the
youtube videos. In Youtube, there are so many online classes, which have been taught
by professional teachers, for English language learners. One of the famous and
effective youtube channels is Linguamarina, where the girl named Marina teaches
some vocabulary, phrases, idioms that native speakers mostly use and also classes
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about speaking like a professional. Furthermore, she shares some of her experiences
when she went to the USA and how to make business plans as well. If students will
practice every day with this kind of programs, they will definitely achieve their goals.
“As English learning develops basic digital literacy skills, many opportunities
will arise to extend English language acquisition outside the class. It means that if a
person is capable of using technology, then he may have a capability to communicate
with people from other countries through online platforms and also this situation may
provide unlimited English language activities. Related to this, digital literacy includes
basic skills: Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing”.
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For listening skills we need technologies more than for other types
of skills. While doing listening tasks students should listen to the audios,
podcasts or videos which are played on the phone, computer or mp3 players.
Even for these basic occasions we need modern technologies.
Speaking skills require watching more videos, films, listening to
music to improve people's vocabulary and it helps to pronounce the words in a
correct way. In recent years as technology has developed, there is a voice
recording platform on everyone’s phone. So, a voice recorder is the most
important program that speaking needs.
For reading tasks students need more texts which can be found from
internet platforms. Students can find textbooks or practice books for reading
from their phones or computers at any time they want. It’s also one comfort that
is made by digital literacy for students.
Writing requires you to have more ideas in your brain, but not
everyone is as intelligent as others. From the internet people can get writing
samples and they may write it with their words, but not copy it, whereas from
these samples they may get a wide range of ideas, advanced vocabulary and also
writing structure. And the next time after practicing it every day students can
write anything from their brain with advanced words and structures.
These are the main points of using technologies in EFL classes.
As we’re living in the era of social media, using the smart technologies in the
classroom may provide interests of students to the lesson. However, it is the demand
of the period that everyone is interested in digital media. To cover this period educators
are using a variety of technologies in their classes. As we mentioned before, in this
century every youth is captivated by smart machines, if lessons will be taught this way,
they will try to do and learn all the tasks that are given as homework. Therefore, e-
teaching will be more interesting and effective rather than simple methods.
Conclusion
Nowadays, use of technology is also included in English language teaching.
Technologies present some opportunities to students to improve their language
learning and language acquisition. Thus, the use of media should be included and is
needed for the teaching system.
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“
DIGITAL LITERACY IN EFL TEACHING”, (2021) Nuriyatul Hamidah.
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This study proposed the theory of digital literacy in EFL classes. And in the
future digital literacy will become the most important way of teaching. So every
educator and teacher should learn how to use technologies in the classes, then they
have to teach lessons via those kinds of machines which cover instruction and content
of learning in the future.
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