Abstract:

We should consider the fact that we are now undergoing one of the most significant technological revolutions for education since the transition from oral to print and book based teaching (Kellner, 2000: 246). As a consequence, this progress to print literacy and book culture involved a dramatic transformation of education, as Marshall McLuhan (1961; 1964), Walter Ong (1988), and others have argued. For this reason, the current technological revolution requires a major restructuring of education today with new curricula, pedagogy, literacies, practices, and goals; since this modification has been demanded during the last century.
The use of digital genres in the language classroom can support a learner-centred approach to teaching. Hypermedia facilitates learner control and make possible to acquire new meaning through a process of personal discovery and inquiry. Hypermedia supports the connection of ideas, thus reflecting the way we learn, and fosters critical thinking. The use of hypertext-linked documents allows the reader to jump from content to content and obtain an endless quantity of authentic materials related to a specific topic. In this sense, Jonassen et al. (1993) consider that “hypertext is among the best examples of constructivist learning environments, because acquiring knowledge from hypertext requires the user to engage in constructivist learning processes”.
The Internet compels learners to be active readers. Therefore, teachers can design activities that rely on the use of multimedia, hypertext, databases and communication tools to create real-life situations where students have to perform different tasks.
In this paper we are going to take into account the design of language learning cybertasks which help students develop an autonomising “wreading” competence (Luzón and Ruiz-Madrid, 2008), where the ability to read online texts and construct one’s own texts meet.

Keywords:

Literacies, digital genres, hypermedia, hypertext, wreading competence, cybertasks.