ABSTRACT
Digital technologies and social media have significantly changed communicative practices within academic and professional contexts. Social media platforms like Twitter or YouTube, for example, are reshaping how being critically literate requires additional skills to reading and writing. Collaborating, maintaining relationships, proposing arguments, discussing knowledge or negotiating meaning now require digital literacy skills in a digitised world. Yet, there appears to be a lack in curriculum or pedagogical development within higher education that would help students develop digital communicative competencies. More focused efforts are needed to fully realise how digital literacies should be embedded across the curriculum, improving not just how languages are taught, but also improving students’ professional and academic communicative competencies required for the twenty-first century. This chapter illustrates how educators can achieve that goal through innovative pedagogies, assessment practices and experiential learning using digital technologies. By exploring examples from a joint-university project, suggestions are made on how teachers and course developers can enhance not only students’ language proficiency, but also empower them with new knowledge and skills for analysing and interpreting information effectively and critically as they study a discipline and engage content.
