Commentary
Digital spaces and language learningProcess, creativity, criticality, and power

Christoph A. Hafner
City University of Hong Kong

In this commentary, I consider contributions to the special issue on Challenges and Affordances in Digital Spaces. The contributions both build on well-established areas of interest in language learning and technology (like digital multimodal composing, for example) and attend to relatively new frontiers in the digital domain (like AI and platformization). I comment on three inter-related themes that are raised in the special issue: (1) process and distributed agency, (2) criticality and creativity, (3) power, platforms and legitimacy. I close with a call for more research to better understand how language and literacy educators can rise to meet increasing challenges in ways that promote active and critical learning, meaningful activity, and individual agency.

Publication history

Date received: 16 July 2026

Date accepted: 14 September 2026

Published online: 20 October 2026

Table of contents

The imperative to understand how language, literacy practices, and learning are shaped by digital tools and in digital spaces is well established and, in a time of accelerating technological change, continues to attract more interest than ever. As the editors of this special issue point out, digital tools and spaces present language learners with both challenges and opportunities. They can be seen as establishing new needs and new contexts for language and literacy learning (Hafner, 2020; Hafner & Miller, 2019). As long ago as 1996, the New London Group of literacy scholars called for a new approach to language and literacy instruction, pointing out the new forms of multimodal representation made possible with digital tools. In addition, digital spaces present new contexts for language learning ‘in the digital wilds’ (Sauro and Zourou, 2019). And digital tools and spaces are not neutral; rather, they function as socio-technical structures that routinely involve ideological power struggle, often between platforms and their users (Darvin & Hafner, 2022; Jones, 2022).

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