background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(23, 43, 77);">The TikTok communicative practices are brevity, multimodality, and algorithmic distribution. Users can remix sounds, take up TikTok challenges, respond to content with material ‘Duets,’ and build upon existing formats through communication forms that require intertextuality. Power is distributed and knowledge communicated through social connection rather than credentials. The algorithm allows the building of organic communities for discussions, which are formed based on interest rather than physical location. Therefore, communication here takes on the nature of an embodied, affective, and performative practice.

One creative literacy tool for learning is Duolingo, an online tool meant to support language learning through gamification and mobile-first design. Rather than relying on traditional, textbook-focused methods to literacy learning, Duolingo uses a combination of reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills in bite-sized and fun lessons that adapt according to the performance of the user. While it is often touted as a language-learning app, it is also a literacy tool, assisting with decoding skills, vocabulary, grammatical understanding, and multimodal literacy in a technology-mediated environment.

The app is organized into bite-sized lessons that a user goes through daily. Examples of activities include matching words to pictures, translating sentences, filling in the blanks, listening to audio clips, and speaking by recording audio with a microphone. Learners are given immediate feedback after each exercise to identify errors correctly. The tool also uses streaks, levels, badges, and leaderboards to encourage engagement. These features of the tool show literacy learning as repetitive, practice-based, and motivated.

Duolingo stands out in its use of gamification and in providing such experiences personalized and adapted experiences to each user, based on the data. The algorithm of the app tracks the progress of the learners and adjusts the level of difficulty accordingly, strengthening the weak sections and promoting the stronger ones.

Digital Social Practices and Innovative Literacy Learning: From TikTok to Duolingo