Ubiquitous Digital Literacy and English Language Education: A Systematic Review

Abstract

This article examines the trends and most recent results of a systematic bibliographical review concerning digital literacy and English language education. The databases used for this purpose were “Web of Science” and “Scopus.” The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the academic literature was based on the most significant scientific studies (374 articles) and the most relevant bibliometric indicators from 1997 to 2020. The study was complemented with a qualitative approach to detect the use and evolution of digital literacy, particularly in English language education, and to identify the methodological trends and different lines of research in applied linguistics. The findings revealed that the most popular articles dealing with digital literacy and the English language increased in the period from 2011 to 2019. Further exploration addressed a gap in the research literature in the year prior to 1997. In addition, while the more cited studies had a significant presence in the research fields of linguistics and educational research, the more recent papers offered a future perspective providing evolutionary contexts not only in digital but in multimodal literacy and English language education. The review sought to answer these questions: What is the evolution of digital literacy in English language education and its correspondence with active learning approaches that are supported by Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)? What are the methodological trends and different lines of research in Applied Linguistics and CALL?.