Developing students’ critical and creative communication by incorporating media literacy into English language teaching

Abstract

The article outlines the results of a study that surveyed incorporating media literacy education into the educational environment and English language teaching in particular. Authors reflect on media literacy practices in language classrooms as modes of teaching that challenge students’ critical communication to resist fake news and disinformation. Language learners usually face the enormous task of learning new vocabulary, syntactic patterns, phonology, and the socio-cultural dimensions of the target language through authentic materials. The objective of the present study is to investigate how best the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages in various forms can enhance the student’s language awareness within language teaching and learning. Our educational approach has drawn on a communication and media literacy framework. The results revealed that suggested teaching strategies to incorporate media and language literacies have contributed to the development of Kazakh students’ critical thinking and creative communication in their English language classrooms. Students demonstrated significant improvements in critical reading and listening and productive and interactive speaking and writing. We assume that learning instructions for text analysis and interpretation within the Communication and Media Literacy framework have great educational potential; since they guide students to acquire additional knowledge and enhance communication skills (planning, information retrieval, decision-making, group communication, discussions, presentation of results, evaluation, etc.).