Multiliteracies Archive

Results in BLC Posts

The Soviet 1960s: A Multiliteracies Approach to Intermediate Russian

Spring 2022 Fellow: Sabrina Jaszi Despite the adoption of a “Multiliteracies” framework in many FL classrooms (Kern, 2000; Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2016; Swaffer and Arens, 2005), a text-centered approach has been slow to catch on in Russian language pedagogy. The need for explicit grammar instruction provides an obstacle, but a holistic, text-focused approach still…

Results in L2 Journal Articles

L2 Multimodal Composing Abroad: Remixing Languages, Cultures, and Identities

This paper explores the second language, digital multimodal composing practices of 12 American undergraduates studying French abroad in Paris. Drawing on multiliteracies, multimodality, and translanguaging frameworks, this study utilizes a qualitative lens and multimodal composing timescapes to analyze how students leveraged languages and modes across 72 digital multimodal reflections and vlogs. Findings demonstrate how reflective multimodal composing developed multilingual identities by fostering metalinguistic awareness and goal-setting practices. Through their vlogs, students additionally participated in transcultural repositioning by making cross-cultural connections and sharing emotional experiences. Throughout the term students increased in traversals of modes, languages, spaces, and places as they became more comfortable with the French language, living in France, and multimodal composing. These results illustrate how digital multimodal composing can enhance learners’ linguistic and intercultural competencies while studying abroad. The article concludes with implications for multimodal composing to learn languages and calls for further research on the reflective multimodal composing practices of second language learners.

Training Foreign Language Learners to be Peer Responders: A Multiliteracies Approach

This study proposes a method for implementing trained peer response within the multiliteracies framework and then qualitatively examines its effectiveness. Three factors are considered: (1) the extent to which peer response training engaged learners in all four knowledge processes; (2) the quality of peer-to-peer feedback; and (3) students’ attitudes about peer response. Findings suggest that collaborative genre analysis moves students through various knowledge processes and equips them to apply literacy-based understandings, knowledge, and skills during peer response. In general, students provided constructive, actionable comments to their peers and reported numerous benefits of both giving and receiving peer feedback. Implications for future research and practice will be of interest to instructors who want to implement peer response as well as curriculum designers who are building literacy-oriented language programs.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Living Literacies

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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