English language as a promoter of media literacy education

Abstract

In a post-literate society, wherein the previous print literacy is augmented to the notion of multi-literacy, media literacy education implies learning and teaching about the media arts to foster the students’ ability to access, analyze, create and evaluate messages in various formats and genres. The paper therefore compares appropriation, collective intelligence, distributed cognition, experiment, judgment, multitasking, negotiation, networking, simulation, performance, play and transmedia navigation in a mother tongue (for example, in Croatian) to English, which de facto is a lingua franca. Hypothetically, language instruction within an expanded media literacy concept facilitates a unified empowering and protective perspective, for it provides for an examination of representational typology to detect censorship, commercialization, copyright breaches, gender and racial stereotypes (for example, sexist expression), propaganda, violence and the Internet privacy infringements (that is, cyberbullying) in the new digital “narratives” or “texts,” too.