Talk about Texts: Interactional Literacies in Second Language Learning

Abstract

Experiencing activities, or those that emphasize learners’ interests, prior experiences, and existing knowledge in new and familiar meaning-making experiences with texts, have been found to dominate multiliteracies second language instruction, often at the expense of activities that involve conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying. Recent analyses and critiques of the multiliteracies framework reveal several implications of this shortcoming, including the tendency to mirror communicative language teaching in the overemphasis of experiencing; that is, learning activities that rely on learners’ personalization of the content and often limit meaning making to evaluative language use, a propensity to overlook the spontaneous and improvised nature of literacies practice in personal and educational spaces, as well as inconsistencies in how language instructors understand and implement literacies in second language instruction (Fterniati, 2010; Leander & Boldt, 2013; Menke & Paesani, 2019; Rowland, Canning, Faulhaber, Lingle, & Redgrave, 2014). One suggested approach to investigating and alleviating this imbalance is the in-depth analysis of activities that typically characterize each of the four multiliteracies knowledge processes, particularly those that facilitate interpersonal modes of communication. This dissertation project implemented three multiliteracies-based simulations in a collegiate-level intermediate German course, during which students adopted a fairytale persona and engaged in interactional activities within a simulated fairytale community. Activities included a hybrid (i.e., online and face-to-face) book club, a public forum, and digital chats during which participants talked with their neighbors about various texts they encountered during the simulations. Data were collected from 14 students enrolled in the course and consisted of 16 audio-recorded and transcribed book club meetings and Google Hangout transcripts. Three major perspectives informed the descriptive analysis of the lesson design and interactions that occurred during the activities: Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis (Cameron, 2001; Schiffrin, 1994), and the multiliteracies framework (Kalantzis, Cope, Chan, & Dalley-Trim, 2016; New London Group, 1996). This study sought to respond to three primary questions: 1. What are the interactional affordances of experiencing activities that emphasize interpersonal language use? 2. What kind of language use characterizes interaction that takes place during these experiencing activities? 3. In what ways does interactional language use that occurs during these experiencing activities contribute to the design of analyzing, conceptualizing, and applying activities? Findings demonstrate ways in which students practice interactional literacies and how these practices can facilitate and signal students’ movement between knowledge processes. This research suggests ways for second language instructors to observe, identify, and analyze interactional language, which in turn informs multiliteracies-based curriculum design.