English for Media Literacy for Educators

Module 4 Video 1 Script

Integrating Media Literacy as Content
in Your English Class
Hello educators! Let’s talk about how to integrate media literacy as content in your English class. Now
you are inspired to engage your students in 21st century, multimodal communication in English. You
know that to prepare your students for success in the real world, they will need to understand and
produce all types of media in English. But where do you begin?

“Untitled image” by JESHOOTS-com via Pixabay is licensed under the Pixabay license.

First, be realistic! If you have a set English language curriculum with a required textbook, you may not
have the freedom to change your curriculum to incorporate new units focused on media literacy.
However, this does not mean you have to give up on the idea of teaching media literacy in your English
class. Here are a few tips!

1. Analyze your textbook and instructional materials. Start with what you have and make note of
the different types of media you can find in your textbook and your school-based resources,
such as audio, video, and digital resources. Perhaps there are existing media that are a part of
your materials that you can analyze using your Media Q&A Routine. For example, discussions
about the images in your textbook could lead to interesting conclusions about who or what is
not represented (e.g., diverse ethnicities, diverse cultures, different lifestyles, different genders)
and what indirect and misleading messages there might be (e.g., most English speakers are
white people from the U.S. and the U.K.).

© 2021 by George Mason University. Module 4 Video 1 Script for the Online Professional English
Network (OPEN), sponsored by the U.S. Department of State with funding provided by the U.S.
government and administered by FHI 360. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons 1
Attribution 4.0 License, except where noted. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
 “Woman Reading a Book” by Polina Tankilevitch
via Pexels is licensed under the Pexels License.

2. Add a media literacy extension activity to an existing lesson. Take a look at your curriculum
and identify some lessons in which you could add a media literacy activity. Perhaps you have a
thematic unit about endangered animals. You could incorporate a lesson on internet hoaxes and
there are several that feature animals. One that is often used by media literacy teachers is the
fake Tree Octopus website (zapatopi.net/treeoctopus). This is a website devoted to saving the
endangered Tree Octopus, but it is all a hoax because there is no such thing as a tree octopus. It
was created for teachers to help students build their media and information literacy skills. You
might also have a unit in your textbook about eating at a restaurant. You could use a few
examples of restaurant reviews on TripAdvisor and have students write their own to enhance
your lesson with real-world social media. Think about the media your students engage with on a
daily basis as well as their interests. How can the theme of your lesson and the language you are
teaching connect to a type of media that they can analyze or create?

2
 “Untitled image” by Headway via Unsplash is licensed under the
Unsplash license.

3. Develop a lesson or unit about media literacy as content for your English class. If you have
flexibility in your curriculum, you could develop an entire thematic unit around a media literacy
topic. For example, you could develop a thematic unit that lasts about 4 to 5 lessons that is
focused on reaction videos. These are videos in which people show their emotional reactions
and share their opinions about other pieces of media, like TV shows, movie trailers, or music
videos. In this kind of unit, students could learn how to analyze media messages and make
commentary on other media using the genre of reaction videos to demonstrate using key
questions based on your Media Q&A Routine. Or, if you have teenage students, you could
develop a thematic unit around a topic like cyberbullying, a very relevant and important topic in
today’s society.

These are three ways you can integrate media literacy into your teaching. It doesn’t matter how flexible
or fixed your English language curriculum is, you can use media literacy as engaging and relevant
content in your English language lessons.