Of New Englishes and and New Literacies

Information Literacy refers to a set of skills needed to store, find, retrieve, analyze, and use information.

Media Literacy is the ability to question, analyze and evaluate messages that inform, entertain, and sell as well as create messages using technology.

Social Media Literacy is the ability to communicate appropriately and to evaluate conversations critically within social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.

Visual Literacy is the ability to produce, interpret and make meaning from information presented in the form of images.

Computer Literacy is the ability and knowledge to effectively use computer and technology.

Tool Literacy is the ability to use tools to manage, consume and create information.

Critical Literacy is the ability to question, challenge and evaluate the messages and purposes of texts.

New literacies question our understanding of language and communication. It means how we conceive of the traditional language and communication skills need to change in line with varying contexts and situations. It means limiting language and communication skills to ‘listening, speaking, reading and writing’ will not address the cognitive and technical skills required in new literacies. For instance, ‘Representing Skills’ which is critical in new literacies cover Visual Representation, Naturalistic Representation, Abstract Representation, Technological Representation and Sensory Representation. What this means is that we need to redefine what we mean and describe as ‘text’ and by extension, what we mean by ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ and more importantly, what we mean by ‘literacy’ and how to appropriate literacy in the ways we read and write texts (Olateju & Oyebode, 2014). This means that we need to understand systems of representation that use different ways of expressing one's self and different forms of media, such as print, drawing, photography, and audio and video recording which is the domain of multimodal literacies.
These different modes of representation create different modalities and these lie behind the new and growing interest in multimodality in discourse studies or multimodal semiotics. (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001, 2006; van Leeuwen, 2001). This point needs to be underscored because discourse is never monomodal but it is inherently multimodal in nature (Ron & Philip, 2004 cited in Olateju & Oyebode, 2014).
The multimodal nature of discourse has implications on how we respond to new Englishes and new literacies. Discourse is therefore shaped and it is being shaped by new and newer forms of language and means of communication including the technologies, verbal and nonverbal resources which make these new literacies possible. New literacies emphasize an increasing interplay of text, images, graphics, music, etc as well as different use of text types, font sizes, italics, underlining, boldface, colours, etc which give new forms and meanings to text. The tendency seem to be that people like to look or see more than to ‘write’ more in the traditional convention of writing or notion of ‘text’.

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