Catherine Jeanneau

Catherine Jeanneau currently works as Coordinator of the Language Learning Hub at the University of Limerick. The centre implements a learner support strategy and provides customised services outside of formal classroom time to learners engaged in formal and informal language learning. She is also delivering pre- and in-service training to language teachers in the field of digital technology and language teaching and learning. Her research interests include second language acquisition, technology and language learning, particularly digital literacy, digital citizenship, online communication as well as learner autonomy and has published several articles and book chapters in this domain. She was recently involved in two European projects on these themes, one with the ECML (e-lang citizen ECML e-lang citizen project team) and one Erasmus+ project called Lingu@num: Erasmus + Lingu@num project.

The language classroom offers many opportunities to enable learners to develop their digital literacy and to act as digital citizens, in line with some of objectives promoted by major international organisations involved in education, including the Council of Europe (Caws et al., 2021; Ollivier et al., 2021).

In this session, we will first examine these opportunities and review some research in this field in an attempt to establish what digital literacy and digital citizenship mean, particularly in the context of language teaching and learning.

We will then explore concrete pedagogical possibilities for implementing these objectives through a socio-interactional approach based on real-world tasks that enable learners to experience authentic communication and social action beyond the walls of the classroom.

Finally, we will briefly present these tasks, which enable learners to become language users and adopt a new posture and reflect on the skills they require to carry out these tasks.