Digital mediations and advanced critical literacies in Modern Languages and Culture

Our interactions with Modern Languages and Cultures have become increasingly digitally mediated over the last few years and this has led to various responses in different sectors according to research focus (linguistics, computer-mediated language learning or cultural studies, to name just three). This debate aims to bring some of the questions these mediations provoke into closer dialogue and to expose common interests (and disparities), between the way each sector responds critically to digital disruptions, limitations, and opportunities. In so doing, we contemplate digital workflows, teaching methods and research practices from school-level education to higher education level, and stretching from foundational digital competences to computationally advanced project-based learning in the digital humanities. The Debate explores: general challenges for the wider Modern Languages community in acquiring digital competences in resource-limited contexts; the use of Virtual Exchange environments to develop digital multimodal and semiotic competences in language learning; the impact ‘digital’ has on the shape and dynamics of Modern Languages as a field; and the experimental, multilingual and dialogic possibilities of the digital humanities “laboratory” in cultivating linguistic-cultural proficiency.