Chantelle Warner, University of Arizona
Foreign Language Literacy: Affect, Aesthetics, & Ethics
Over the past couple of decades “literacy” has emerged as a key term in L2 teaching and learning. This has been driven by a renewed and re-theorized interest in how text-based practices mediate and are mediated by human activity across diverse media, linguistic, and discursive channels often captured by the term “multiliteracies” (New London Group, 1996). By shifting attention to how language users design meaning in different social contexts using a variety of linguistic and multimodal resources, contemporary scholarship on FL literacy has pushed scholars and curriculum developers to critically engage with assumptions of native-like comprehension and appropriateness that defined much of the early research on second language reading and writing. The first part of this talk will provide a brief history of these developments within foreign language teaching and learning. The second part of the talk, however, will argue that focusing so intently on the linguistic design of particular texts and text types has created a tendency to neglect the lived experiences of literacy, including importantly aesthetic experiences and ethical imperatives. Drawing from recent work in education and applied linguistics as well as case studies from language classrooms, the talk will make a case that more attention to these affective dimensions of literacy is needed, especially as collegiate foreign language departments work to position themselves within contemporary ecosystems of higher education.
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Friday, October 13, 2017
3 – 5 pm
B-4 Dwinelle Hall