To Transform or Not to Transform? Understanding the Digital Literacies of Rural Lower-Class EFL Learners

This case study builds on Bourdieu's theory of practice to explore the ways in which two rural lower-class EFL learners-Andy and Xu-developed contrasting digital literacy trajectories in non-instructional and naturalistic settings. This study also seeks to examine how different online literacy trajectories impact rural lower-class students' struggles to claim the right to speak across time and space. Findings reveal that habitus, as a system of transferable and durable dispositions molded by individuals' past conditions of existence, plays a vital role in shaping their initial marginalized status in university classrooms and in directing them to diverse digital literacies in the wild that might contribute to or hinder the reproduction of legitimate capital in urban spaces. With the dynamic interplay of habitus operation and capital accumulation in online spaces and the offline institutional field, the two learners developed different ways of reframing their rural identities by performing digital literacies of various kinds. I highlight that such different patterns demonstrate the reproduction or transformation of inequality for rural learners from lower-class backgrounds in the digital age. This study closes by calling for more effort to create enabling conditions for lower-class EFL learners in the digital age.