Journal of Discourse Review
Open Access Humanitarian Scholarship
7 days
Time to first decision
Open Access Humanitarian Scholarship
Time to first decision
Volume: 1 Issue: 3
Year: 2025, Page: 240-251,
Received: Sept. 10, 2025 Accepted: Oct. 14, 2025 Published: Dec. 26, 2025
The rapid expansion of digital technologies has profoundly reconfigured educational ecosystems, with particularly significant implications for English language education among engineering students in Hyderabad. Digital platforms, artificial intelligence–enabled applications, mobile learning tools, and virtual classrooms have altered pedagogical practices, promising enhanced accessibility, personalization, and transnational communicative engagement. Yet these promises remain unevenly realized, as digital transformation continues to reproduce structural inequalities rather than uniformly mitigating them. Even within an urban and technologically advanced context such as Hyderabad, engineering students from marginalized socio-economic backgrounds and disability-affected communities encounter persistent barriers to access, participation, and meaningful engagement with digital learning environments. Positioned within critical perspectives on digital pedagogy, this paper examines digital inclusivity in English language education by advancing the argument that inclusion must be conceptualized not merely as access to technology but as the cultivation of learner agency. Employing a mixed-methods research design that combines a systematic literature review, surveys, case studies, semi-structured interviews, and pilot pedagogical interventions, the study identifies key structural and pedagogical constraints while evaluating inclusive digital practices. The findings demonstrate that while digital technologies hold substantial transformative potential, inclusive outcomes are contingent upon robust infrastructure, teacher preparedness, collaborative stakeholder engagement, and sustained policy support.
Keywords: Digital inclusivity, English language education, digital divide, accessibility, adaptive learning, educational technology
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© 2025 JDR Academic Trust. This is an open-access publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Ali, M., & Sharma, V. (2025). From access to agency: Digital inclusivity in contemporary English language education. Journal of Discourse Review, 1(3), 240–251.