The Handbook of Informal Language Learning

25Digital Writing in Informal Settings Among Multilingual Language Learners

BINBIN ZHENG AND CHIN‐HSI LIN

Introduction

Out‐of‐school literacy practices have been a topic of increasingly scholarly interest over the past two decades, from different theoretical perspectives, in various contexts, and for a variety of purposes (Hull and Schultz 2001). Hull and Schultz stressed the importance of leveraging students' out‐of‐school identities and literacy practices in classroom environments. However, the gulf between students' out‐of‐school and in‐school literacy practices has only been widened by the rapid emergence of digital media (Harklau and Pinnow 2009), as people with access to digital tools and the internet now have unprecedented opportunities for learning via social media, language, games, and problem‐solving activities (Ito 2010).

Indeed, digital media have reshaped the forms, genres, and purposes of reading and writing in ways that transcend traditional literacy's emphasis on the encoding and decoding of print‐based texts (Chun et al. 2016). New literacies research, an evolution of the sociocultural perspective, focuses on multilingual, multicultural, and multimodal reading, writing, and meaning‐making as social and cultural practices mediated by digital technologies (Gee 2000; Knobel and Lankshear 2007; Reinhardt and Thorne 2011; The New London Group 1996). The boundaries among literacies, genres, and representations start to blur (Godwin‐Jones 2015), and the emergence ...