Building ESL Learners' Digital Literacy Skills Using Internet Memes

Digital literacy skills are crucial twenty-first-century skills that are required for the successful use of technology and active engagement in today's world. However, there is a lack of effective resources and guidelines for developing English as a second language (ESL) learners' digital literacy skills. Due to their increasingly important and influential role in contemporary society, Internet memes hold great potential for language teaching and learning, particularly given their infectious nature. Internet memes are digital compositions that convey concepts and ideas via a variety of media types, including image, text, audio, and video. In this article, we describe the characteristics and value of memes as a digital resource and explore the ways in which memes can be used to enhance ESL learners' digital skills. Pegrum et al.'s digital literacies framework provides the lens to both examine memes and inform the development of a detailed guide that teachers can use when selecting appropriate memes for use in the ESL classroom. We also provide an exemplar task for using memes to build intermediate ESL learners' language and digital literacy skills based on the guide and include links to some useful websites for meme resources and meme-related activities.