ABSTRACT
Nowadays, the screen plays a more important role in modern society than ever before, although it may not immediately supplant paper. Scollon and Scollon (2004) make it clear that a dichotomized view of face-to-face and Internet-mediated life, and the difference between real and virtual, dissolves under examination of lived communicative practice (Thorne, 2005). Internet-mediated language education emphasizes participation in dialogue and development of the linguistic and meta-communicative resources necessary for carrying out such processes (Thorne, 2005). Tandem learning, reciprocity, and learner autonomy may evolve with Internet-mediated language education. Visual elements in the new medium, particularly with multimodal texts, have gained prominence. Multimodal texts integrate not only text-based writing, but also sound (music and speech) and images (still, animated, and video-based). The interest of readers dominates what brings sense of the (written) representation. Digital technologies offer new opportunities of literacy practice so that the reader can become author, perhaps even in the process of reading, in ways that were not possible with the book.
