Abstract:

Integrating media literacy into the existing school curriculum is of profound importance to challenge students’ critical thinking skills, creativity, and functional literacy. This paper aims to explore the development of media literacy in Foreign Language classrooms by focusing on teachers’ media literacy perceptions and tensions. This research uses a qualitative approach by conducting semi-structured interviews with secondary school teachers in Kazakhstan.

Media literacy as a concept and a teaching purpose is therefore corresponding with the perception of education as a socialization process for active involvement in a democratic society (Tyner, 2014). Media-literate teachers will have enhanced capacities to empower students with their efforts in learning autonomously and pursuing lifelong learning. In the research about maximizing impact on teacher professional development, secondary school teachers are identified as the most significant factor in the learning context (Hattie, 2012). This is specifically the case for teachers of foreign languages, who have a particular interest in the international community (Korona,2020).

Existing studies suggest that media literacy is a very complex term because there is no evidence for a commonly shared meaning (Potter, 2022). Some of those meanings vary from one another in minor details and some vary in a broader sense. However, even small variations in meaning can cause problems when educators hold different perceptions of the same concepts. Therefore, before implementing larger-scale research in developing students’ media literacy, we must explore how teachers understand it. There are core issues in the formulation of the conceptual framework of media literacy education. We aim to identify the attempts of teachers to formulate the definition of the key concepts such as “media”, “literacy”, and “media literacy”. With a better understanding of how teachers perceive the key concepts of media literacy, it will be possible to identify existing issues and suggest further research areas. The research was driven by the following research questions:

How do EFL teachers of secondary schools in Kazakhstan perceive media literacy in education?

What are the possible challenges in implementing media literacy?

Thus, I determine the object of study from the point of view of a subjectivist epistemology, in which the researcher and the object of research are interactively bonded so that the results are created as the research proceeds (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). It aims to generate knowledge grounded in the EFL teachers’ contexts. Data were collected through naturalistic observations, reflective journals, and semi-structured interviews.