Developing social media literacies through online social reading practices

The ubiquitous use of digital technologies led to the emergence of a "participatory culture" (Jenkins H., 2006), which involves engagement through converged content by means of new literacy practices in socio-interactive contexts. Such practices include digital social reading (DSR), which is a collaborative form of participation around a text as the meeting place. This study aimed to show how DSR can be efficiently exploited in language teacher education programs and offers an innovative technological alternative that can be implemented as part of emergency remote teaching practices. For this purpose, the data were collected and consisted of pre-epidemic outbreak DSR activities of 40 English Language teacher candidates and their experiences about the integration of DSR into a language teaching methodology course. The analysis of participants' collaborative practices revealed that social media literacy practices of participants mainly consisted of networking, collective intelligence, appropriation, simulation, transmedia navigation, and judgment. It was further shown that the level and extent of participants' social media literacy practices were not the same. However, most exhibited a wide range of such literacies during the project. The study concludes with the implications of digital social reading and social media literacy practices for a multitude of contexts, particularly at challenging times.