Unpacking Media Literacy: Exploring Undergraduate Students' Understanding Towards Critical Consuming

Abstract

This study explores how undergraduate students understand media literacy (ML), and how their critical consuming abilities function during a news-reading process. The participants were 35 students from the NTU Triangle Alliance. Semi-structure interview and article reading for four cases were designed for data collection. The findings show that interviewees have limited understanding of ML, and they did not consider the knowledge and skills related to media production as part of ML. While questioning the credibility of Taiwanese media, their reaction to the articles was only based on the distrust of Taiwanese media, not on the function of their ML ability such as analysis, synthesis, or evaluation. Thus, the authors suggest that Taiwanese media literacy education should not just focus on offering knowledge of ML at a cognitive level, but enhance students' competence in media literacy in higher education.

Keywords

• critical consuming
• media literacy
• media literacy education
• undergraduate students