Digital Society and critical Reading: how is language teacher education being planned in times of emergence of disinformation technologies?

Abstract

The popularization of digital technologies caused a true sociocultural revolution in the forms of communication, providing different spaces and new ways of interaction, both in the scope of personal and professional relationships. In today's digital society, the wide use of different resources and social media has also facilitated the production and circulation of knowledge, requiring greater agency and mastery of different forms of language use from users, as well as new interpretation skills, since the digital space has also become a fertile ground for the circulation of disinformation. This scenario is presented as a justification for this text, which aims to observe how language teachers are prepared for the process of training critical readers from the emergence of digital technologies. Methodologically, it starts with the documental analysis of five pedagogical projects of on-site courses of Licentiate in Portuguese Languages at Federal Universities located in Rio Grande do Sul (Brasil). It is considered that for the training process of the critical reader it is essential, first, that the initial training of language teachers provides teachers with theoretical and practical experiences on the concepts of new literacies; multimodality and communication; multiliteracies and Digital Literacy. As a result, it was identified that, of the five analyzed courses, only two provide affordances for the development of new literacies, multiliteracies and teaching digital literacies.