Digital pedagogic genres

Digital genres are increasingly employed by academics and science journalists not only to communicate with peers but also to disseminate academic knowledge to broader audiences and to serve as pedagogical tools in e-learning contexts. This chapter focuses on this dissemination and the educational purpose of digital genres. It begins by examining the affordances that make these genres suitable for educational and teaching purposes (e.g., hypertextuality, multimodality, interactivity, and wide reach). Next, it reviews research on the linguistic and discursive features of these genres, focusing in particular on blogs and news websites for science dissemination (e.g., The Conversation), social media formats such as Twitter/X genres, and audio(visual) genres, such as educational podcasts or YouTube science videos. Finally, since digital media create new needs for EAP learners—including the need to interpret and produce emerging genres and participate in new communicative practices—and provide new contexts for learning, this chapter discusses studies on how digital genres can be effectively integrated into the classroom to help students develop academic and digital literacies.