The new contexts and challenges of the 21st century require the implementation of methodologies and resources that focus both on words and on other modes of representation to construct knowledge. To this end, language education involves paying attention to diverse pedagogical demands of a global and digital world. This chapter supports the notion of literacy as a multidimensional concept and proposes the “learning by design” concept as a means for teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) to use born-digital texts and other visual elements. To this end, a learning path has been designed following the pedagogy of multiliteracies to work with first-year students in the course “English for teachers” at the University of València. The results show a very positive impact regarding the enhancement of learners to become meaning-makers and express their ideas in the target language.
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The general interest of this article lies in introducing born-digital texts in the teaching of EFL. As will be shown, the focus is not only on the improvement of the language skills, but also on how these resources provide effective ways of developing students’ multiliteracies and process of meaning-making. As Kern (2000), Westby (2010), Cope and Kalantzis (2015) and Reyes-Torres et al. (2021) point out, the notion of literacy has expanded very rapidly over the last decades and it is no longer used exclusively to mean comprehension and production of printed texts (reading and writing); today literacy is understood as a broad dynamic and multidimensional process that integrates the comprehension and production of a wide variety of communication modalities to create and transform knowledge (Kucer, 2014; Serafini, 2014; Paesani et al., 2016; Warner & Dupuy, 2018).
Significantly, nearly all texts that students encounter nowadays can be considered multimodal and include a significant number of signs and symbols to communicate information such as letters and words in varying fonts, drawings, pictures, color, videos, audio sounds, music, facial gestures, body language, etc. Therefore, the term “text” does not solely apply to a narrative discourse, but rather to a wide range of media products and modes of meaning-making: advertisements, picture books, music, and born-digital videos, among others (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Stafford, 2011; Reyes-Torres & Portalés-Raga, 2020). As a result, literacy development in our current multimodal society should embrace the ability to read and write, but also to speak, listen, view and enable students to become meaning-makers (New London Group, 1996; Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). Today learners face a multiliteracies landscape in which they must be able to interpret and construct meaning not only from written texts, but also from images, songs, spaces, born-digital artefacts and so forth. Literacy, in fact, has turned into multiliteracies –multiple literacies– and in consequence, a multimodal approach should be incorporated in today’s education (Kress, 2010; Serafini, 2014; Reyes-Torres et al., 2021).