The Hong Kong New Literacies Project: Enhancing English language education for the 21st century

Abstract

The proliferation of mass media, popular culture, digital and mobile technologies has resulted in profound changes to everyday communication and the nature of texts. New multimodal and dynamic forms of texts and textual practices, or ‘new literacies,’ have emerged in the 21 st century (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). Outside school, young peoples’ lives are infused with digitally-mediated literacies and popular cultural texts, whereas their school lives tend to be dominated by single mode, static texts which give little recognition to the powerful role of pleasure and desire in engagement in literacy. This paper introduces The Hong Kong New Literacies Project, a collaborative action research project which aims to prepare English teachers in Hong Kong primary and secondary schools to meet the new cognit ive and semiotic demands of mult imodal literacies in the 21st century. The project addresses three elements of new literacies in English language education: multimodality, popular culture, and critical literacy. We report on the first stage of the project, in which teachers and students from twelve primary and secondary schools were interviewed and surveyed to gain information about their engagement with new media and communications technologies and various forms of popular culture and their conceptions of literacy and literacy education.