The notion of New Literacies (and the interdisciplinary field of New Literacy Studies) developed in the 1980s and 1990s in reaction to cognitive skill-based models of reading and writing that focused largely on language processing and knowledge development at the level of the individual. Literacy increasingly came to be understood not just in terms of cognitive processes but also as a dynamic set of social practices that vary across contexts and communities and that are imbued with cultural values (with this plurality of forms, functions, and goals reflected in the term literacies). At the same time, there was growing recognition of how non-linguistic dimensions of texts contribute to the making of meaning. This set the stage for discourse-oriented research on the Internet, digital texts, hypertext, and multimodal electronic communication—which revealed new demands on people’s ability to produce and interpret texts and created new imperatives for literacy education. This entry traces approaches to literacy in language education from Michael Halliday’s notion of language as social semiotic, Brian Street’s distinction between ideological and autonomous models of literacy, James Gee’s work on ideology in discourse, and Gunther Kress’s work on multimodality to the New London Group’s 1996 multiliteracies manifesto and its impact over the past 25 years, especially in the area of second/foreign language education. It concludes with a discussion of evolving new literacies related to the introduction of generative artificial intelligence applications.