ABSTRACT
Digital technologies offer a wide range of tools to support the development of literacy skills in ESL learners. Unprecedented advances in technology have made what is current, appropriate, and effective for literacy instruction a moving target. Teachers are faced with the need to identify, evaluate, and integrate potentially valuable digital literacy tools in their curricula in order to scaffold classroom instruction and prepare learners for literacy skills mediated by digital technologies that they will need in their prospective workplaces. In this chapter we provide a brief overview of some of the benefits and opportunities as well as the issues and challenges related to technology and literacy instruction, with the view that teachers should have a general understanding in order to customize software tools available in the marketplace and resources provided by this book to suit their own classroom contexts. We present terminology related to technology and literacy instruction followed by a discussion of online critical literacy. A section on developing literacy skills presents some digital tools to promote literacy skills, followed by a discussion of issues teachers face in integrating such tools in their classrooms.
