„Exploring the links between media and information literacy and Systemic Functional Linguistics“, No. 09.3.3-LMT-K-712-19-0221

Project No. 09.3.3-LMT-K-712-19-0221             
Project title: „Exploring the links between media and information literacy and Systemic Functional Linguistics ”
Project duration: from 2020-09-01 to 2022-08-31
Postdoctoral trainee – dr. Viktorija Mažetoenė
Postdoctoral supervisor – doc. dr. Vilhelmina Vaičiūnienė

Summary: Media and information literacy (MIR) encompasses crucial human skills that, in today’s highly technologised and mediatised world, are essential for resilience to disinformation and fake news, because, in addition to critical thinking, it includes an understanding of the nature of the media itself, its veto principles and its purpose. Information reaches us in complex forms: scholars note that multimodality is becoming increasingly important and that the amount of linear text is decreasing. It is therefore no longer enough to provide definitions of MIR and to extract and classify the skills associated with MIR. The novelty of this project stems from the need to explore in more depth how language is vetoed and changed in the mediatised world of multimodal information, how linguistic changes are linked to the patterning of information on social media, i.e. how populists, for example, are able to convey their world view and to engage with large numbers of people with short messages in social media and in the public sphere. The project aims to scientifically investigate and describe how the concept and skills of MIR relate to the theoretical foundations of SFL and the practical prerequisites for the application of SFL to text analysis in a context of information overload, the dangers of disinformation and propaganda, and the profound mediatisation and technologisation of human activities. The following activities are foreseen to achieve the objective: preparation of a discussion paper for publication, following analysis of previous scientific publications and recent scientific literature and data; use of technological tools for the scientific and systematic analysis of textual data sets; preparation of an English-language scientific monograph.

Result to be achieved: The results of the research include 2 articles published in high quality scientific journals, 2 presentations at international scientific events, published theses and a monograph in English.

The project is financed by the European Social Fund under measure No. 09.3.3-LMT-K-712 “Development of scientific competence of scientists, other researchers, students through practical scientific activities”