This special volume on “Living Literacies” is an addendum to an existing body of work in L2 education that has amassed over the past few decades, which makes a collective case that literacy ought to be a central pedagogical objective for language and culture curricula. This has been a particularly predominant discourse in collegiate foreign language teaching, where the calls for a paradigm shift are often directly coupled with critiques of the bifurcated curricular models that have long shaped foreign language departments (e.g., Allen & Paesani, 2010; Kern, 2000, 2003), though interest in L2 literacy over the past couple of decades has also been associated with broader discussions around …
L2: Volume 10 Issue 2
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- French
Unraveling the Affordances of ‘Silas Marner’ in a Japanese University EFL Context
Graded readers, simplified versions of literature and other texts at graduated levels of difficulty, are widely employed in contexts of foreign language pedagogy and are widely considered to be a form of written-language input ostensibly suitable for a wide array of developmental stages. However, the efficacy of graded readers is not unchallenged, among which criticisms is that the language in a graded work of literature is, by nature, aesthetically inert and inauthentic, in comparison to the original. Still, from an L2 literacies-development perspective, could one not justifiably accept that aesthetic impoverishment and inauthenticity are reasonable, perhaps also unavoidable, compromises? Practically, what, for example, could a typical intermediate-level …
Exploring Digital Literacy Practices via L2 Social Reading
This exploratory study analyzes the digital literacy practices that resulted from learner-learner interactions within a virtual environment when collaboratively reading eighteen Spanish poems via a digital annotation tool over a four-week period in a college-level Hispanic literature course. Using an ecological theoretical perspective and centering on the affordance construct (van Lier, 2004), we investigate how linguistic characteristics of the poems affect the nature of learners’ annotations and also analyze how learners’ written comments/annotations change over time when engaging in L2 social reading. Findings suggest that when the lexical diversity of the poems increased, the number of literary affordances …
Designing Meaning and Identity in Multiliteracies Pedagogy: From Multilingual Subjects to Authentic Speakers
This essay examines textual engagement of two students during a Multiliteracies lesson on a French poem (Liberté, Paul Eluard) in terms of the multilingual subject (Kramsch, 2009) and the authentic speaker (Van Compernolle, 2016). The case studies are based on personal data: (1) the students’ autobiographies written on the first day of the course; (2) the transcript of their annotated comments about the poem; (3) their essays comparing the French poem to an English translation; and (4) their retrospective analysis about the effects of the multiliteracies lesson and course. The essay begins with a review of the Multiliteracies Framework, and the concepts of the multilingual subject and the authentic speaker. Next, the essay turns to …
Textual Borrowing and Perspective-Taking: A Genre-Based Approach to L2 Writing
This qualitative study explored the impact of reading on writing in a collegiate French culture course that emphasized genre-based writing pedagogy. In particular, the study focused on how 19 advanced collegiate learners of French used model text resources in writing a letter-manifesto and what their perceptions were of participation in genre-based writing instruction. Based on this study’s findings, the authors make an argument for how genre-based pedagogy can facilitate …
Literacy-based Curricula in University Foreign Language Instruction: Perceptions from Non-Tenure-Track Faculty
Recent scholarship has underscored the need for a new paradigm in university foreign language programs and put forward literacy as a necessary curricular goal (e.g., Byrnes, Maxim, & Norris, 2010; Kern, 2000; Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2016; Swaffar & Arens, 2005). In light of the high percentage of courses they teach, non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) are instrumental to implementing new curricular paradigms. As such, knowing how they understand literacy and its role in foreign language education is essential to advancing the implementation of literacy-based pedagogies. This study reports on how non- tenure-track faculty conceptualized literacy during a 2.5 month Professional Learning Circle (PLC). Sociocultural and cognitive dimensions of literacy dominated the ways in which participants conceptualized literacy and its associated pedagogies; linguistic dimensions were backgrounded. Findings suggest that …
This paper presents a narrative account of teaching-researching-learning processes in practice, in the context of a language teacher development program at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. Approaching L2 literacies as the interplay of intersubjective, sensory, and embodied experiences of language users in their situated encounters with symbolic forms at the art museum, the paper explores pedagogical pathways towards multiliteracies through encounters with …
Developing Academic Literacy and Researchers’ Identities: The Case of Multilingual Graduate Students
A growing number of bilingual and multilingual national and international students are enrolling in graduate programs in the United States, creating an urgent need to understand how these writers build knowledge of unfamiliar academic genres and become part of their disciplinary academic communities (Selony, 2014). Such students struggle with specific-to-the-discipline composition of written texts, exerting their agency in new academic tasks, and research identity issues. Following an activity theory framework, this case study investigates how three graduate students with diverse educational, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds (Spanish as L1, L2, and heritage language and English as L1, L2, and dominant language) experienced these processes and overcame obstacles by examining …
Against the Odds: Literacy Sponsorship in One Migrant Student’s Trajectory to College
Ivan (pseudonym), the son of Mexican migrant farmworkers, rarely spent more than six months in the same school and by high school was still classified as an English language learner. This article traces Ivan’s experiences as a language learner and writer, telling his story in his own words through his writing and ethnographic data collected during his junior year of high school and his first year of college. I examine how literacy sponsors (Brandt, 2001) helped or impeded his reading and writing as he worked to change his life. Through Ivan’s writing and oral reflections, I argue that rather than solely supporting their reading and writing development, literacy sponsors for immigrant second language writers support learners as a whole. Central to Ivan’s evaluation of his literacy sponsors is the role of caring relationships—or lack thereof—that endured longer than the technical literacy skills he learned from any one sponsor.
Mobile Language Learning: The Medium is ^not the Message
This paper repositions McLuhan’s (1964/1965) extension theory of technology in the context of mobile (-assisted) language learning (MALL), and explores whether and how the medium (i.e., the mobile device) impacts the message (i.e., the target language) and the means by which it is taught in MALL. A survey of recommended commercial MALL apps generated four top-ranked apps, which were reviewed, then trialed in an autoethnographic study of learning Italian to explore how language, communication, and language pedagogy were theorized, enacted, and assessed in each app. On the whole, MALL apps were found to …