This paper draws from the need to approach 21^st century university students as reflective viewers and thinkers able to read digital texts, thereby properly acquiring language, culture and literature as a continuum. We aim to explore and identify our 21^st century EFL/ESL university learners’ viewing and thinking needs through the use of memes in the EFL/ESL classroom. Accordingly, we conducted a classroom-based study with 52 final year students on the Degree in English Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain. We developed and implemented a meme-based activity and a rubric for measuring the capacities of our students as effective critical and visual readers. Results point to the need for an emphasis on critical thinking and visual literacy skills in the EFL/ESL university classroom, as visual communication gains prominence in a competitive world while students remain to lack preparation in this area. The processing of multimodal texts remains on a superficial level. Essential needs were detected concerning the interpretation of the cultural meanings of the texts, and the identification of their supposed intentions.

本文从需要接近21名平^ST世纪大学生的反射观众和思想家能够读取数字文本，从而适当地获取的语言，文化和文学作为一个统一体。我们旨在探索和确定我们的21^世纪通过在EFL / ESL教室中使用模因来学习世纪EFL / ESL大学学习者的观看和思维需求。因此，我们在西班牙马德里的Complutense大学对52名最后一年的学生进行了基于课堂的研究，学习了英语研究学位。我们开发并实施了一项基于模因的活动和一个专栏，以衡量学生作为有效的批判和视觉读者的能力。结果表明，EFL / ESL大学教室中需要强调批判性思维和视觉素养技能，因为视觉交流在竞争激烈的世界中日益突出，而学生对此领域仍然缺乏准备。多模式文本的处理仍停留在表面上。发现了有关文本文化含义解释的基本需求，