Enhancing Visual and Critical Media Literacy in a Foreign Language Classroom through Media Production and Digital Storytelling: Students' Voice and Agency

Abstract

Grounded in the a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996), this dissertation reports on the implementation of a fourth semester French curriculum informed by Cope and Kalantzis's (2000, 2009, 2015) framework of learning by design, with a focus on visual and critical media literacy development to enable intermediate French students to consider multimodal texts from the perspective of consumers as well as producers and to understand the meaning potential that exists between and within the semiotic resources afforded in media production (Nelson and Kern, 2012). Drawing upon "the value of postmethod [and] postlinguistic teaching… which are not looking at language learning in the traditional sense… [but] rather at learners’ acquisition of… the ability to reflect on textualization and contextualization, considering language as one important dimension of semiosis among others" (Nelson and Kern, 2012, p. 61), this dissertation project examined how the frameworks of visual and critical media literacy within the process of design enhanced students' voice and agency in the foreign language classroom. The first inquiry aims to explore if and how a curriculum centered around visual and critical media literacies creates the conditions to 1) foster students' awareness of media ethics in the consumption and production of everyday media, and 2) engage students in a process of reflection upon the meanings created by semiotics resources used in mediated-texts, and their impact on shaping their vision of the world. Findings demonstrated that the implementation of visual and critical media literacy frameworks gave students the opportunity to reflect on their use of media and the ethical implications, and to foster students' greater understanding and interest in self-reflection and considerations of others. The second inquiry aims to demonstrate, through the production of digital storytelling, how instructors might address diversity in foreign language classrooms by 1) allowing students to connect universal themes (e.g. technology, friendship, immigration) with their personal stories, and 2) by giving them the opportunities to display their uniqueness by using their own voices and positioning themselves as participative agents for social change. Findings demonstrated that digital storytelling fosters classroom diversity by allowing the exploration of individual differences and enhancing the understanding of the distinctiveness of every individual. The third inquiry, a case study explores how Digital StoryTelling (DST) 1) contributes to students' understanding of the way semiotic resource choice and orchestration construct layers of meaning and satisfy the purposes of the message conveyed to the audience, and 2) supports students' agency through the process of design. Findings showed the potential of using multimodality projects as they allow students' emerging literacies to take center stage in the foreign language classroom and increase students’ agency and ‘semiotic agility’ (Prior, 2010; Thorne, 2013).