Abstract

Reading literacy today means more than decoding a written text: it is the ability to recognise, integrate and process information that arrives through many channels at once – words, images, numbers, sounds, gestures and the space around us. This theoretical study examines international student and staff mobility as a setting in which such integrated recognition and processing of information is tested to the full, in a foreign language and in real time. Starting from the image of a traveller who sees the signs and recognises the words, yet cannot grasp what they mean, it brings together perspectives from aesthetics, linguistics and pedagogy, ethics and economics. It proposes three concepts – situational illiteracy, cultural bilingualism and the ethos of the foreigner – and an integrated model that links four layers of mobility (recognition, processing, interpretation and decision) to the literacies they engage, the risks they carry and the support they require. Culture shock is interpreted as a crisis of reading that, with institutional and mentoring support, can lead to metaliteracy.

Keywords

  • reading literacy
  • integrated information processing
  • international mobility
  • situational illiteracy
  • culture shock
  • metaliteracy
  • cultural bilingualism
  • mediation
  • translation
  • rhetoric
  • soft power
  • Visegrad Group

Funding

International Visegrad Fund, project “Developing Reading Literacy Through Integrated Information Recognition and Processing”.

About the authors

Tigran Mikayelyan

Faculty of Foreign Languages, Armenian State Pedagogical University, Yerevan, Armenia

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3968-2566

Tigran Mikayelyan is Associate Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the Armenian State Pedagogical University in Yerevan. He holds a PhD in philology. His research covers comparative linguistics, discourse analysis, TEFL and Spanish studies.

Zdenka Gadušová

Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8954-659X

Zdenka Gadušová is professor at the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. Trained in English and Russian philology, she works on foreign-language didactics, teacher education, and the assessment of teacher competence. Her books and studies, published internationally, draw on this combination of philological and pedagogical research. She has held senior academic roles and has coordinated international educational projects.

Editorial board profile →

Šimon Pavera

London, United Kingdom

https://orcid.org/0009-0003-9456-2206

Šimon Pavera, born in Prague, has been immersed in the humanities since childhood, with a lasting interest in foreign languages, theatre, film and digital media. At the centre of his academic work lies economics and the principles of the free market, which he has explored through historical and contemporary case studies. That interest showed itself in his secondary-school projects and continues to develop in his early undergraduate years.

Prof. Dr. Libor Pavera

Prague, Czech Republic

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6916-8483

Libor Pavera lives in Prague and works across Central Europe. His research addresses the development of schools and education, aesthetics in the broad sense (the individual arts), and new media – fake news, deepfakes and related phenomena – as well as LTI and “harmful language”, both in theoretical work and in applied studies and projects. In the Visegrad+ project he led the team of authors that produced a monograph on conceptions of literacy in the contemporary world. His long-standing engagement with aesthetics also informs his interest in how contemporary schooling can engage the body, the voice and the full range of the senses.

Editorial board profile →

How to cite

MIKAYELYAN, Tigran, GADUŠOVÁ, Zdenka, PAVERA, Šimon and PAVERA, Libor. Literacy in Motion: International Mobility as a Laboratory of Literacies. Global Insights & Research Network [online]. 2026, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 143–179. ISSN 3029-8318. Available from: https://doi.org/10.68794/girn.2.07

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Licence and copyright

Copyright © 2026 Tigran Mikayelyan, Zdenka Gadušová, Šimon Pavera and Libor Pavera. This article is open access, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

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