Exploring Digital Literacy Practices Through the Lens of Translanguaging and Trans-Semiotizing: A Study of Digital Citizenship Among University Students

• In Event: Technology-Facilitated Youth Development

Abstract

This qualitative study investigated how university students constructed digital citizenship through their digital literacy practices in social media. Informed by translanguaging and spatial repertoire, the findings suggest that digital citizenship construction entails complex interplay between individuals’ social, educational and economic practices in digital space, and their agency of deploying language and semiotic recourses to enhance the communicative effect in academic and social circumstances and achieve intellectual development as well as social engagement. The participants’ digital citizenship is dynamically constructed in and across sites for different types of social and communicative activities. Their agency has been facilitated by the generative and agentive nature of the social media in which digital literacy activities take place. Implications for digital citizenship education are discussed.

Authors

• Michelle Mingyue Gu, Education University of Hong Kong

• Corey Fanglei Huang, Lingnan University

• Wanyu Ou, Chalmers University of Technology