Writing Archive

Piecemeal but Promising: Technology Integration in Secondary Language Classrooms by Paige Ware, Southern Methodist University In the last ten years, the pace at which technology has been integrated into classroom instruction in US secondary educational institutions has quickened rapidly. Often invoking a discourse of “21st century learning,” vibrant calls abound for schools to focus on…

In the latter half of the 1960s, without meeting each other and without knowing each other’s language, French poet Pierre Garnier and Japanese poet Niikuni Seiichi 新国誠一 collaborated to create French-Japanese concrete poems. This essay examines the interlingual encounters ...

One of the more remarkable developments in translingual literature over the past decade has been the rise of a new wave of Soviet-born authors writing in languages other than their native Russian. Autobiographical elements have always figured prominently in their fiction, and some of these authors have recently crossed the boundary into non-fiction by writing memoirs. The process of writing in a second language about becoming a writer in a second language gives these books a particular self-referential quality. This essay surveys the latest memoirs and auto-fiction (published 2012-14) of five Soviet-born immigrant novelists in the U.S. and Germany—Gary Shteyngart, Lena Gorelik, Lara Vapnyar, Olga Grjasnowa, and Maxim Shrayer.  It argues that constructing a narrative of the self for a foreign audience serves as a crucial step in the gestation of a translingual novelist. This narrative urge often predates the actual mastery of the new language. Rather than as the result of an already-achieved acquisition of a new linguistic medium, telling one’s story in a non-native language emerges as a means toward language learning and integration.

The premise of this publication and collective exploration is that through literacy, and in particular L2 writing, personal phenomenological experience can be reflectively inspected, explicated and presented for interpretation by others and as such can be used as an important resource within the language classroom...

In this paper, I highlight four distinct but interconnected areas of my life history that I refer to as autobiographic poetic waves. These waves are layered with the complex underpinning of racial, linguistic, gendered, classed, and professional identity politics...

This article reports on a classroom-based experience that draws from the critical approach to heritage Spanish language teaching and Hanauer’s concept of meaningful writing...

Writing to express emotions can be a challenging task for second language (L2) writers, especially because it tends to be a process that is less addressed in language classrooms.  This paper aims to expand thinking on L2 literacy and writing by exploring how L2 writers can express emotion (fear) through narratives...

This article describes a pedagogical project designed to optimize opportunities for individual, creative expression in L2 academic writing...

This study presents results of a May 2009 online survey that asked foreign language program directors at U.S. universities about corrective feedback options their teachers use in response to student writing in beginning and intermediate courses. Survey categories included ...

Second language teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is a sophisticated combination of pedagogical and content knowledge. This study explores the acquisition and articulation of PCK, highlighting ...