Heather Lotherington
York University, Education, Emeritus
- Multilingual Education, Multimodal Literacy, Multimodality, Multi- & Bilingualism & Biliteracy, Second Language Acquisition, Language and Literacy Development, and 14 moreAcademic Access In Minority Populations, Bilingualism, Mentoring, Technology In Second Language Learning, Reading Strategies and Cognition, Educational, Teacher Education, Creativity, Educational Leadership, Complexity Theory, Educations, Intercultural Education, Digital Media & Learning, and Digital Literacyedit
- Professor Emerita, Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto 11-12/2022: Visiting Scholar, University of Wester... moreProfessor Emerita, Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto
11-12/2022: Visiting Scholar, University of Western Australia
2-4/2017: Gordon and Jean Southam Fellow, Curtin University, Perth, Australia
2016-2017: York-Massey Visiting Scholar, Massey College, Torontoedit
This book documents a collaborative action research project in one school where researchers and practitioners worked together to develop multimodal literacies and pedagogies for diverse, multilingual elementary classrooms. Following... more
This book documents a collaborative action research project in one school where researchers and practitioners worked together to develop multimodal literacies and pedagogies for diverse, multilingual elementary classrooms. Following chronologically from Lotherington’s Pedagogy of Multiliteracies (2011a), this volume picks up after teachers and researchers have learned how to work efficiently as a learning community to offer project-based learning approaches. This edited collection relates how teachers and students of different grade levels, language backgrounds and abilities developed a shared agenda and created a framework for effective and inclusive practices. Contributors demonstrate that collaboration, creative pedagogical solutions and innovative project-based learning are all essential parts of learning and teaching socially appropriate and responsive literacies in a multimodal, superdiverse world.
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Pedagogy of Multiliteracies tells the evolving story of teachers’ trial-and-error interventions to engage children in multiple modes of expression involving structured play with contemporary media. Using the complex texts created, the... more
Pedagogy of Multiliteracies tells the evolving story of teachers’ trial-and-error interventions to engage children in multiple modes of expression involving structured play with contemporary media. Using the complex texts created, the teachers carve spaces to welcome the voices of children and the languages of the community into the English-medium classroom.
Research Interests: Educational Leadership, Multi- & Bilingualism & Biliteracy, Complexity Theory, Learner Autonomy, Intercultural Education, and 17 moreLearning Styles, First Language Acquisition, Gifted Education, Writing systems, Plurilingualism, Knowledge building, Global education, Emergent Literacy, Multiliteracies, Motivation, Curriculum Design and Evaluation, Study skills, Beliefs and attitudes, Pedagogical Innovation, International Collaboration, Analyzing Multimodal Texts, and Design and Assessment of Educational Material
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The New London Group’s 1996 manifesto was a clarion call to educational researchers to fundamentally redesign language and literacy education for the needs of global learners communicating in evolving digital media environments. In this... more
The New London Group’s 1996 manifesto was a clarion call to educational researchers to fundamentally redesign language and literacy education for the needs of global learners communicating in evolving digital media environments. In this conceptual overview, the ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ of multiliteracies are critically re-examined from the perspective of mobile digital language learning in posthumanist media ecologies, with attention drawn to paradigm shifts in language, technology, multimodality and context. We argue that Web 3.0 environments, AI, and rapidly emerging algorithmic cultures have outpaced earlier critical theorizations of multiliteracies and digitally-mediated learning practices as well as meaningful implementation of multiliteracies pedagogies in schools. We then reconsider the affordances and constraints of Web 3.0 tools for multilingual/plurilingual language learning, and sketch pathways for critical and productive engagements with mobile devices and multiliteracies pedagogies that reframe and advance the important critical work of the New London Group.
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Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Language Acquisition, Multilingualism, Multicultural Education, Linguistics, and 10 moreFirst Language Acquisition, Writing systems, Elementary Education, Emergent Literacy, Multiliteracies, Bilingualism and Multilingualism, Curriculum Design and Evaluation, Case Study, Analyzing Multimodal Texts, and Design and Assessment of Educational Material
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Abstract: At an elementary school in inner city Toronto, I am working with the principal, a kernel group of primary teachers, and the school's technician to develop children's digital literacies. Main Street School is... more
Abstract: At an elementary school in inner city Toronto, I am working with the principal, a kernel group of primary teachers, and the school's technician to develop children's digital literacies. Main Street School is dedicated to the pursuit of social equity for its population ...
Research Interests: Educational Technology, Teaching English as a Second Language, Digital Literacy, Multi- & Bilingualism & Biliteracy, First Language Acquisition, and 6 moreWriting systems, Emergent Literacy, Multiliteracies, Curriculum Design and Evaluation, Analyzing Multimodal Texts, and Design and Assessment of Educational Material
Abstract This paper traces the choices made in language and literacy education in Fiji from pre‐contact socialization into the genesis of formal education under the auspices of British missionaries to colonial administration and through... more
Abstract This paper traces the choices made in language and literacy education in Fiji from pre‐contact socialization into the genesis of formal education under the auspices of British missionaries to colonial administration and through to republican policy and practice. ...
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ABSTRACT This article summarises the results of a multidimensional study of a content-based bilingual education programme piloted in a suburban high school in Melbourne in which specialist subjects taught in Chinese and Vietnamese were... more
ABSTRACT This article summarises the results of a multidimensional study of a content-based bilingual education programme piloted in a suburban high school in Melbourne in which specialist subjects taught in Chinese and Vietnamese were offered to Grades 9 and 10 students optionally enrolled in the Chinese–English or Vietnamese–English stream. The study incorporated a coordinated action research methodology in which four participating specialist teachers documented their teaching progress, problems, interventions and reactions which provided the basis for regular shared discussions. The principal researcher, who participated in the meetings, documented the collective progress of the course, focusing particularly on biliteracy acquisition. Problems faced and lessons learned over the pilot year are documented here.
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Schools are hierarchical institutions where discourse has been historically patterned. This realization struck me after I met for the first time with elementary school teachers in Toronto who shared my interest in exploring the concept of... more
Schools are hierarchical institutions where discourse has been historically patterned. This realization struck me after I met for the first time with elementary school teachers in Toronto who shared my interest in exploring the concept of multiliteracies for children's multilingual learning. That is when it dawned on me that teachers and researchers have very different ways of talking, and until we sorted out how to democratically share ideas, we would not be able to do collaborative action research. This chapter narrates the incremental learning shared by a university researcher and a cohort of elementary school teachers to establish a discourse facilitating the multi-directional dialogic learning (Bakhtin [1975] 1981) necessary to do truly collaborative action research.
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Linguistic communication has moved beyond simple alphabetic encoding to multimedia design, challenging the fit of structural theories of language to digital communication. This transition is barely evident in mobile language learning... more
Linguistic communication has moved beyond simple alphabetic encoding to multimedia design, challenging the fit of structural theories of language to digital communication. This transition is barely evident in mobile language learning contexts where top-selling apps present language as a linguistic structure to be drilled, ironically bypassing the complex communicative potential of smart devices. This article overviews changing language norms from language as structure to language within multimodality, and comparatively discusses multimodality from a social semiotics paradigm nested in linguistic theory and from Elleström’s intermediality paradigm. To illustrate how one could conceptualize multimodality from a perspective decentred from linguistics, and leveraged to explain language use in multimedia contexts, the author examines two novel features of digital communication: emoji and conversational digital agents.
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In recent years there has been increased academic and professional interest and awareness in approaches to English language teaching (ELT) that take a plurilingual approach. This is often combined with a multimodal stance. The outcome of... more
In recent years there has been increased academic and professional interest and awareness in approaches to English language teaching (ELT) that take a plurilingual approach. This is often combined with a multimodal stance. The outcome of this combination is an approach to English language teaching that integrates multiple languages and multiple semiotic resources. This paper examines how a plurilingual approach to ELT can be viewed through a multimodal lens by analyzing the construction of a plurilingual talking book created as a student project in an elementary public school. The analysis uses multimodal analysis software to map the interaction of languages and images, in order to determine how these function as meaning-making resources in a multimodal, multiple-language text created by linguistically diverse students with high ELT needs. The findings indicate how combinations of different semiotic resources work together to create meaning, delineates the role of English in meaning-making, and illustrates the children’s multilingual interactions in the creation of their collaboratively composed multimodal talking book.
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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... more
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 repackaged outdated language teaching pedagogies, and failed to capitalize on the affordances of mobile connection apart from piecemeal incorporation of gamification strategies and social media links. The article concludes with a call for professional educators to harness, not just consume, mobile technologies towards informed design-oriented MALL pedagogies.
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Early childhood education is intrinsically multimodal. The kindergarten discovery orientation to learning emphasizes play and embodied multisensory learning, but this is traditionally retracted as children gain control of alphabetic print... more
Early childhood education is intrinsically multimodal. The kindergarten discovery orientation to learning emphasizes play and embodied multisensory learning, but this is traditionally retracted as children gain control of alphabetic print in the early grades. The introduction of digital tools and networks is more recent in elementary education. Digital mediation affords a powerful lens on hands-on learning, augmenting, expanding, and complicating multimodal learning and introducing new tools, textual products, and spaces for reflection and communication. Digital multimodal literacies also challenge fundamental assumptions about the starting point of emergent literacy, which is assumed to be the ABCs.
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Social communication has changed dramatically since Canale and Swain’s (1980) statement of communicative competencies for French as a second language (FSL) testing, which outlined language/grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and... more
Social communication has changed dramatically since Canale and Swain’s (1980) statement of communicative competencies for French as a second language (FSL) testing, which outlined language/grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competencies (see also Canale, 1983).2 Communicative input/output was described in terms of four skills—reading writing, speaking, listening—that captured the media of communication of the times. However, times have changed, and communicative competence needs an upgrade to meet the needs of web 2.0 environments. This chapter reviews how communication practices have evolved over the past three decades in concert with developments in technical communications media and reconceptualizes the analogue frame- work of language/grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competencies as a digital framework encapsulating multimedia, collaborative communication, agentive participation, and multitasking competencies.
Enrica Piccardo (2013, this issue) makes a cogent case for the post-structural redesign of language teaching and learning within a paradigm of plurilingualism, in concert with the linguistic landscape of the global village. She... more
Enrica Piccardo (2013, this issue) makes a cogent case for the post-structural redesign of language teaching and learning within a paradigm of plurilingualism, in concert with the linguistic landscape of the global village. She conceptualizes the individual’s communicative competence as a plurilingual facility that encompasses knowledge of language varieties in addition to different languages. This fluid notion of plurilingualism is a radical proposition for language education, moving pedagogical designs beyond language, structurally defined, as the basis of second language, foreign language, and bilingual education towards models accommodating customized, plural and hybridized language education, conceived as linguistic inclusion in the culturally diverse classroom. In describing our research, I address political barriers to conscripting plurilingualism as a base for pedagogical development, as well as digital possibilities in the linguistic landscape of the global village.
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The linguistic landscape (LL) is a sociolinguistic concept that captures power relations and identity marking in the linguistic rendering of urban space: the city read as text. As such, LL is embedded in the physical geography of the... more
The linguistic landscape (LL) is a sociolinguistic concept that captures power relations and identity marking in the linguistic rendering of urban space: the city read as text. As such, LL is embedded in the physical geography of the cityscape. However, with the increasing scope of multilingual capabilities in digital communications, multilingual options and choices are becoming more prevalent in virtual space.These virtual linguistic voices are important forces in global language ecology. In this paper, the concepts of virtual linguistic landscape and linguistic cyberecology are delineated and exemplified in a variety of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications and environments. It is argued that the LL of virtual space, though grounded in the concept of multilingual interactions within a physically defined world, has distinct characteristics to the digital world that continue to evolve conterminous with the complex relationship of the real to the digital.
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!is chapter explores the educational gap between contemporary cyberspace communications that bring youth of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds together in an era of local-global synergies, and resources and approaches used in... more
!is chapter explores the educational gap between contemporary cyberspace communications that bring youth of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds together in an era of local-global synergies, and resources and approaches used in English language and literacy teaching and testing, and questions the political agenda to gate-keep restrictive literacy attainment which creates unhelpful divisions between L1 and L2 users. !e authors raise relevant communicative issues for second language users in this discussion of contemporary digital genres and platforms that are growing in global popularity, such as contending with the shi"ing orthographic conventions used in digital conversations which at the same time facilitate conversational practice free from the stigma of an identifying “foreign” accent.
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As a component of the study on educational game development as a learning activity for advancing student literacy, a qualitative sub study was conducted in order to collect more nuanced, context-rich information. The game development... more
As a component of the study on educational game development as a learning activity for advancing student literacy, a qualitative sub study was conducted in order to collect more nuanced, context-rich information. The game development process was ...
LITERACY HAS CHANGED. In the 21st century, we access interactive texts via ubiquitous portable digital devices, making texts – and the ability to use or create them – collaborative, mobile and complex. To prepare children for present and... more
LITERACY HAS CHANGED.
In the 21st century, we access interactive texts via ubiquitous portable digital devices, making texts – and the ability to use or create them – collaborative, mobile and complex. To prepare children for present and future literacy needs, we need to revise how we frame and teach literacy. The new comprehensive literacy combines digital multimodal literacies and print-based reading and writing practices. But how do we change the literacy teaching paradigm?
In the 21st century, we access interactive texts via ubiquitous portable digital devices, making texts – and the ability to use or create them – collaborative, mobile and complex. To prepare children for present and future literacy needs, we need to revise how we frame and teach literacy. The new comprehensive literacy combines digital multimodal literacies and print-based reading and writing practices. But how do we change the literacy teaching paradigm?
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At a multicultural elementary school in Toronto, Canada, students in grades 1 and 2 digitally rewrote the traditional children's story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” The traditional tale was transformed into individualized narratives,... more
At a multicultural elementary school in Toronto, Canada, students in grades 1 and 2 digitally rewrote the traditional children's story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” The traditional tale was transformed into individualized narratives, with new characters, setting, and plot twists, and the students moved from reading the original story on paper to writing a revised version on screens. This process enabled them to engage with narrative structure, not only as emergent readers external to the text but also as authors of their own text versions.The project aimed to teach narratives, to experiment with the creation of digital literacies, and to test a process by which traditional children's literature can be made more socially and culturally inclusive for contemporary readers. The article describes the sociopolitical context of the study and places it within an evolving theory of multiliteracies, focusing on the pedagogical process used to create a digital narratives in a primary classroom. Examples from the children's rewritten stories are provided.
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York University, Canada sk8Celine (12: 17: 10 AM): do u like bonjovi?!(u better say yes!) sk8Celine (12: 17: 12 AM)::-* honeygarli (12: 17: 18 AM): sorry for taking you away from your work sk8Celine (12: 17: 23 AM): eee!!!!!!!!!!!!!... more
York University, Canada sk8Celine (12: 17: 10 AM): do u like bonjovi?!(u better say yes!) sk8Celine (12: 17: 12 AM)::-* honeygarli (12: 17: 18 AM): sorry for taking you away from your work sk8Celine (12: 17: 23 AM): eee!!!!!!!!!!!!! honeygarli (12: 17: 26 AM): jovi is alright ...
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This paper argues for the need to postmodernize literacy education for civic engagement in an emerging new world order where humans are globally-connected in an invisible digital dimension, yet physically dispersed in greater degrees of... more
This paper argues for the need to postmodernize literacy education for civic engagement in an emerging new world order where humans are globally-connected in an invisible digital dimension, yet physically dispersed in greater degrees of complexity. The paper summarizes a university-school collaborative learning community’s evolving playbook on experimental multimodal and plurilingual language and literacy education, and illustrates project-based learning, inclusion of children’s linguistic and cultural knowledge in classroom learning, immersive ludic activities, collaborative problem-solving, and agentive participation in an elementary school classroom project.
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This paper examines the trend in apps for mobile language learning (MALL), which has achieved remarkable popularity, indicated in the proliferation of apps available in the digital marketplace, and in download statistics. The burgeoning... more
This paper examines the trend in apps for mobile language learning (MALL), which has achieved remarkable popularity, indicated in the proliferation of apps available in the digital marketplace, and in download statistics. The burgeoning popularity of MALL apps in the field of second language learning (SLA), which has a lengthy history (Howatt & Widdowson, 2004; Kelly, 1969), motivates critical examination of the epistemological conception of language and literacy in MALL apps, and pedagogies employed.
MALL utilizing apps (i.e., software applications) evolved from computer-assisted language learning (CALL) with the development of mobile smart devices over the past decade. Bo-Kristensen and Meyer (2008) trace the genealogy of technology-enhanced language teaching from the 1950s language lab through to the virtual and mobile language labs of the early 21st century. Kukulska-Hulme (2009) describes MALL designs as content-driven, or curricular, and design-oriented learning. But where Bo-Kristensen and Meyer (2008) take a positive outlook on how mobility could contribute to the flexibility of technologically-enhanced language learning designs, Godwin-Jones (2011), finds MALL apps to be pedestrian and uncreative, not utilizing “the mobility, peer connectivity, or advanced communication features of mobile devices” (p. 7).
Digital mediation has revolutionized how we communicate and how we learn, and challenged understanding of what it means to know a language. Conventional grammar is a poor descriptor of contemporary multimodal literacy. A recent analysis of popular content-based MALL app, though, revealed not only an overwhelming reliance on conventional grammar and traditional skills (Lotherington, 2016) but pedagogical approaches leaning on what Kramsch (2006) describes as the drill and kill pedagogies of the 1960s.
Privileging the digital artefact to drive learning removes the agency of the human teacher and delivers limited, flawed programmable learning. Learning languages on demand using free and low cost MALL apps is an attractive option that begs careful, critical scrutiny of what is being taught in the name of language learning and how, so educators can move content-based MALL towards the creative possibilities that mobile designs, in fact, offer.
MALL utilizing apps (i.e., software applications) evolved from computer-assisted language learning (CALL) with the development of mobile smart devices over the past decade. Bo-Kristensen and Meyer (2008) trace the genealogy of technology-enhanced language teaching from the 1950s language lab through to the virtual and mobile language labs of the early 21st century. Kukulska-Hulme (2009) describes MALL designs as content-driven, or curricular, and design-oriented learning. But where Bo-Kristensen and Meyer (2008) take a positive outlook on how mobility could contribute to the flexibility of technologically-enhanced language learning designs, Godwin-Jones (2011), finds MALL apps to be pedestrian and uncreative, not utilizing “the mobility, peer connectivity, or advanced communication features of mobile devices” (p. 7).
Digital mediation has revolutionized how we communicate and how we learn, and challenged understanding of what it means to know a language. Conventional grammar is a poor descriptor of contemporary multimodal literacy. A recent analysis of popular content-based MALL app, though, revealed not only an overwhelming reliance on conventional grammar and traditional skills (Lotherington, 2016) but pedagogical approaches leaning on what Kramsch (2006) describes as the drill and kill pedagogies of the 1960s.
Privileging the digital artefact to drive learning removes the agency of the human teacher and delivers limited, flawed programmable learning. Learning languages on demand using free and low cost MALL apps is an attractive option that begs careful, critical scrutiny of what is being taught in the name of language learning and how, so educators can move content-based MALL towards the creative possibilities that mobile designs, in fact, offer.
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Over the past two decades, following the publication and widespread take-up of the New London Group's landmark call to action: A pedagogy of multiliteracies, teachers, researchers, and policy makers have been refocusing teaching and... more
Over the past two decades, following the publication and widespread take-up of the New London Group's landmark call to action: A pedagogy of multiliteracies, teachers, researchers, and policy makers have been refocusing teaching and learning for an emergent global society that is interconnected in real time and space, and, simultaneously, in a virtual dimension that was only vaguely perceived in 1996. A pedagogy of multiliteracies signalled the pressing need to lift the concept of literacy off the linguistically and technologically restricted page towards complex, hybridized multimedia literacies that spill across the ephemeral borders of education, literacy, second language acquisition, media literacy, cultural studies, and applied linguistics. As the static, unidirectional 2D world on paper has disintegrated into dynamic, multidirectional, crowd-sourced, cloud-based knowledge construction, individually measurable reading-writing-listening-speaking skills have given way to cognitively-distributed problem-solving, using a digital toolkit enabling collaborative R/W authoring; plurilingual and multimodal design; ludic and maker pedagogies; even post-human communication with bots. In this wildly changing communication landscape, interdisciplinarity is an essential coping mechanism. In 2002, I walked into an inner city elementary school in northwest Toronto as a researcher, wanting to understand how multiliteracies were reshaping the coalface of emergent literacy. They weren't, but the principal was keen to understand how to improve learning for a 90% immigrant population. The school had a mandate to use what was then naively described as technology to boost the chances of success for children who were poor, and had little, if any, knowledge of English, much less of the cultural complexities of Canadian identity. Through shared " how do we do this? " problem-solving, we formed a small school-university working group to try out new ideas for bringing children's linguistic and cultural knowledge—their funds of knowledge (Moll et al, 1992)—into digital cross-curricular literacy projects. As our learning community grew, it became a regular theory-practice workshop timetabled into the school day, where a core of dedicated educators and researchers met to plan, and conduct pedagogical interventions across classes, grades, and subjects to inject the languages of the community into digitally-supported, multimodal projects (see: Lotherington, 2011). Over a decade, we rewrote literacy education, school culture, and our own understandings of learning, responding in the process to challenges about how to teach a class of 25 children speaking 16 different languages, and how to cope with the incessant rate of technological change. This presentation describes our dialogic learning process, and pedagogical experimentation, and showcases a sample of elementary school children's beautiful plurilingual, multimodal products.
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While schools attempt to merge new technologies and digital literacies in curricular instruction, the social permeation of mobile digital devices, uptake of social media, and utilization of apps is far more evident in social practice.... more
While schools attempt to merge new technologies and digital literacies in curricular instruction, the social permeation of mobile digital devices, uptake of social media, and utilization of apps is far more evident in social practice. Mobile digital technologies enabling novel learning designs hold much promise for both classroom (Mahruf et al, 2010; McCombs et al, 2006), and self-access learning (Kukulska‐Hulme, 2009). However, a 2014 survey of Canadian teachers' use of educational technologies (Mindsharelearning, 2014), confirms that the use of mobile devices in the classroom lags behind their ubiquity in social spheres. The ubiquitous app—a third party computer program designed for mobile devices, and available at minimal or no cost to the user—is less than a decade old. In 2007, Apple produced a game-changing smart phone, which was a powerful portable computer capable of wireless Internet connection (Sanford, 2015), and enabling the user to communicate interactively in context. This presentation draws data from two studies on mobile language learning apps to disentangle the growing profusion of apps for language learning, examine the theory and pedagogy behind popular language teaching apps and consider how the affordances of mobile technologies might be imaginatively utilized for effective teaching and learning.
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We are living in an age of increasingly flimsy national borders that are globally permeable and digitally porous. Our learners are a global remix whose stories may be simple or complex; straightforward or convoluted. They join school... more
We are living in an age of increasingly flimsy national borders that are globally permeable and digitally porous. Our learners are a global remix whose stories may be simple or complex; straightforward or convoluted. They join school classrooms, in person and online, and merge as learners who may have been displaced from a homeland, or reunited with a family. Learners may have come to the nation or to a particular city as transients, opportunists, idealists, fugitives, entrepreneurs or employees. They enter our classes as learners needing to develop articulate, literate, and agentive expression. It is up to us as teachers to develop each learner's individual knowledge and capabilities while meeting local and national language and literacy expectations. This is a very tall order. Teachers are required to nurture language and literacy learning towards standards that reflect past norms and benchmarks and meet historic national identity tropes. These are undeniably necessary educational goals but they are insufficient in an era where social and economic communication continues to move relentlessly into a digital dimension of time disembodied from space that is, for the most part, unlimited by national borders. This amorphous digital playground, rife with ethical potholes, commercially ransacked spaces, and biased narratives is, nonetheless, an inescapably fundamental canvas for contemporary communication. The digital tools we use to communicate are evolving so quickly that no teacher or school can keep on top of the technology, the evolving discursive and textual forums and genres, and how, whether and exactly what to teach. Teachers are squeezed, trying to meet formal expectations that students communicate according to provincial or regional standards; find common ground in their classrooms of learners of mixed backgrounds and abilities; sort out which digital tools are accessible and helpful for contemporary communication; and mollify parents expecting constant and instant English for their children while trying to experiment towards the repeated refrain that formal education should teach towards creativity and innovation, not fixed subject matter. This talk presents a number of ideas from our evolving playbook on post-modernizing the subject-oriented curriculum, and superficially digital classroom to reread/write literacy education for digital and global times. The evolving playbook comes from a decade of collaborative action university-school research on developing language and literacy education that is play-based, digitally multimodal, and inclusive of the typically ignored non-official languages spoken by school children and their families. Though our formal research study has come to an end, we continue to analyze and write about what our learning community gleaned from our longitudinal research and share our hard-earned learning with teachers and researchers.
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The Grade 5 teachers at an urban elementary school in Toronto have planned their annual project within an ongoing action research study to co-design innovative pedagogies for plurilingual, multimodal literacies. Over a decade, our... more
The Grade 5 teachers at an urban elementary school in Toronto have planned their annual project within an ongoing action research study to co-design innovative pedagogies for plurilingual, multimodal literacies. Over a decade, our university-school learning community worked intensively but below the policy radar on reinventing elementary education for the culturally diverse, digitally-savvy student population the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) serves. Over half of all students in the TDSB enter school as speakers of languages other than English or French; at Joyce Public School, that percentage is much higher. The teachers are planning to have their grade 5 students design their own worlds this year. It is a bold project, inviting the chaos of ontological creation into quotidian learning.
At this elementary school in northwest Toronto, teachers truly did rebuild their own pedagogical world—one of plurilingual welcome for community schoolchildren in a school system designed for official bilingualism in English and French. Toronto, the capital of Ontario, is a superdiverse urban centre, where nowadays only a minority of school entrants speaks the language of schooling. The bountiful language diversity of Toronto ought to be nurtured as an investment in the global future; instead it is treated as problematic to the national language goals of a school system built to bridge past battles. To reconfigure education for the needs of the school population, our learning community adapted the how rather than the what of teaching to welcome into the classroom the language knowledge children brought to school rather than focusing on remediating the language knowledge they lacked. This presentation describes how a school in a system tangled in historic aims for language education, present realities, and future aspirations created a unique path to welcome linguistic heterogeneity into the classroom.
At this elementary school in northwest Toronto, teachers truly did rebuild their own pedagogical world—one of plurilingual welcome for community schoolchildren in a school system designed for official bilingualism in English and French. Toronto, the capital of Ontario, is a superdiverse urban centre, where nowadays only a minority of school entrants speaks the language of schooling. The bountiful language diversity of Toronto ought to be nurtured as an investment in the global future; instead it is treated as problematic to the national language goals of a school system built to bridge past battles. To reconfigure education for the needs of the school population, our learning community adapted the how rather than the what of teaching to welcome into the classroom the language knowledge children brought to school rather than focusing on remediating the language knowledge they lacked. This presentation describes how a school in a system tangled in historic aims for language education, present realities, and future aspirations created a unique path to welcome linguistic heterogeneity into the classroom.
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Language has long been assumed to be a human trait, though experiments have shown human language to be teachable to intelligent primates through visual, aural and gestural channels. Our research consortium researches patterns of... more
Language has long been assumed to be a human trait, though experiments have shown human language to be teachable to intelligent primates through visual, aural and gestural channels. Our research consortium researches patterns of communication emerging in the contemporary digital-physical sphere. Increasingly, digital mediation is forging human-machine communication circuits (e.g., voice-activated personal assistants on smartphones) that augment or even replace human-human communication circuits (e.g., telephone/videophone calls). Of particular utility in the field of second language learning is the speech to speech/text loop with voice-activated systems that can be repurposed for pronunciation practice and language acquisition opportunities.
Devices enabling human-machine communication permeate the world of digital access. Speech-enabled interactive programs run a vast gamut, from computerized call centres to voice-to-text transcription programs to vehicle satellite navigation systems. Indeed, computer voice interfaces have so interpenetrated life that they are routinely anthropomorphized: referred to as he or she, as with Siri, iPhone’s built-in voice-activated assistant. But amid justified philosophical and psychological concerns regarding humans engaging in meaningful interactions with machines in the post-human communication spectrum also come new opportunities in learning. The language commands for voice-activated systems can be repeated and refined in human-machine communication circuits enabling useful practice opportunities that are semantically consequential, and emotionally nonthreatening.
This paper reports on a slice of research on contemporary digital communication skills, practices and competencies. This presentation speaks to second language learning opportunities using pedagogically repurposed voice-activated computer systems.
Devices enabling human-machine communication permeate the world of digital access. Speech-enabled interactive programs run a vast gamut, from computerized call centres to voice-to-text transcription programs to vehicle satellite navigation systems. Indeed, computer voice interfaces have so interpenetrated life that they are routinely anthropomorphized: referred to as he or she, as with Siri, iPhone’s built-in voice-activated assistant. But amid justified philosophical and psychological concerns regarding humans engaging in meaningful interactions with machines in the post-human communication spectrum also come new opportunities in learning. The language commands for voice-activated systems can be repeated and refined in human-machine communication circuits enabling useful practice opportunities that are semantically consequential, and emotionally nonthreatening.
This paper reports on a slice of research on contemporary digital communication skills, practices and competencies. This presentation speaks to second language learning opportunities using pedagogically repurposed voice-activated computer systems.
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Language policy is de facto as well as de jure (Shohamy, 2006). In Ontario, de jure policy limits the linguistic media of communication in the classroom to English and French, following the Official Languages Act. For the most part,... more
Language policy is de facto as well as de jure (Shohamy, 2006). In Ontario, de jure policy limits the linguistic media of communication in the classroom to English and French, following the Official Languages Act. For the most part, spaces for nonofficial minority languages, encapsulated under the rubric: international languages, are found in the marginalia of public education—after school in heritage cum international language classes, or in limited high school options where European languages such as German and Spanish make their way into traditional language object study. Policy, though, is also de facto, invisibly forged through social practice. Without intervention, schools can and do support attitudinal biases against nonofficial language use.
Numerous teachers at Joyce Public School in Toronto can recall incidents where newcomers to Canada were singled out in the classroom and bullied for their perceived lack of English. Interestingly stories extend to supply teachers as well as children. In this city, where over 50% of all children entering school speak a language other than English or French at home, all public schools welcome a slice of the super-diverse urban population that has come to characterize this city. Every class is linguistically diverse.
At Joyce Public School, about 2/3 of children speak a nonofficial minority language at home. Teachers participating in school-university research to develop socially responsive literacy education banded together to design and teach cross-curricular projects that focused on the theme of respect. This presentation describes how the culture of an elementary school changed over the course of a 10-year collaborative action research project (2002-2012) and outlines the positive collateral effects in its de facto language policy.
Numerous teachers at Joyce Public School in Toronto can recall incidents where newcomers to Canada were singled out in the classroom and bullied for their perceived lack of English. Interestingly stories extend to supply teachers as well as children. In this city, where over 50% of all children entering school speak a language other than English or French at home, all public schools welcome a slice of the super-diverse urban population that has come to characterize this city. Every class is linguistically diverse.
At Joyce Public School, about 2/3 of children speak a nonofficial minority language at home. Teachers participating in school-university research to develop socially responsive literacy education banded together to design and teach cross-curricular projects that focused on the theme of respect. This presentation describes how the culture of an elementary school changed over the course of a 10-year collaborative action research project (2002-2012) and outlines the positive collateral effects in its de facto language policy.
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Lifelogging is the name given to the practice of wearing a tiny camera that takes pictures at automatic intervals to capture unedited life in progress. The wearable camera used for lifelogging is intended for dynamic journalling of... more
Lifelogging is the name given to the practice of wearing a tiny camera that takes pictures at automatic intervals to capture unedited life in progress. The wearable camera used for lifelogging is intended for dynamic journalling of private life moments. These pictorial lifelogging data can also provide the researcher with rich information on communication interfaces. The intention of collecting and analyzing such data is to support an evolving framework describing new communicative competencies.
This presentation outlines a workshop introducing the concept of communicative competence used widely in second language teaching and testing, and linking what are outlined as linguistic communication skills to the technologies fundamentally employed in processing communication. I briefly outline how epistemological conceptions of communication skills have not kept apace the technical capabilities of communications media, and while quotidian communication practices have rapidly evolved, language professionals’ notions of fundamental communicative competencies have not (for the most part).
This presentation outlines a workshop introducing the concept of communicative competence used widely in second language teaching and testing, and linking what are outlined as linguistic communication skills to the technologies fundamentally employed in processing communication. I briefly outline how epistemological conceptions of communication skills have not kept apace the technical capabilities of communications media, and while quotidian communication practices have rapidly evolved, language professionals’ notions of fundamental communicative competencies have not (for the most part).
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ABSTRACT For a scholar working in the developing field of multiliteracies, it is illuminating to read how multiple literacies are conceptualized in research and pedagogical practice. Swaffar and Aren's approach in Remapping the... more
ABSTRACT For a scholar working in the developing field of multiliteracies, it is illuminating to read how multiple literacies are conceptualized in research and pedagogical practice. Swaffar and Aren's approach in Remapping the Foreign Language Curriculum: An Approach though Multiple Literacies is grounded in literary theory and cultural studies, developed as a plea - and a plan - for a culturally embedded genre-based approach to the study of 'foreign' languages in response to the assumed superficial linguistic understanding of what is to be accomplished in the traditional foreign language (FL) classroom. It is an invitation to rewrite the canon that is refreshingly inclusive of minority language study. The book provides stepping stones for understanding and including in the FL curriculum theories and methodological approaches that are typically packaged, within the social sciences and humanities, as 'literature,' 'literary theory,' 'sociolinguistics,' and 'cultural studies.' The volume is, at its core, a how-to book, and a very good one, though focused rather narrowly on what the authors judge to be traditional post-secondary FL classroom teaching in the US context. This is consequential for a Canadian readership, given different political orientations to the study and use of multiple languages in the United States and Canada. The term 'foreign language' has been discarded in many national contexts. In Australia, the notion of a 'foreign language' has been rejected, given the country's policy of multiculturalism, and exchanged for the more inward-looking term 'community languages' (Clyne, 1991). At the large urban university where I work in Canada, the department is called, simply, Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. The terms used in the secondary school system in Ontario, however, are less inclusive: 'heritage' languages, referring to inter-generational maintenance rather than to acquisition by a more multicultural student body; and 'international' languages, denoting a global vista rather than a community focus. In chapter 1, which addresses the need for an institutional rethinking of language teaching, the authors define language as 'a set of culture-based performances, situated in various public, private, and disciplinary contexts' (p. 20), and ask readers to consider the fact that foreign language centres 'often reify, or at least exacerbate, the language/context schizophrenia that language-acquisition research has found to be undesirable' (p. 24). Chapter 2 stresses the need to reinterpret language fundamentals as 'social and linguistic negotiations within and across cultures' (p. 28) and to rearticulate the traditional notions of beginner-, intermediate-, and advanced-level learners. This chapter, together with chapter 3, which probes readability, charts out activities and approaches for less advanced language learners that do not forgo cognitively challenging literacy materials. In general, however, the book addresses more advanced learners. In chapter 4, the authors offer new ways of understanding top-down and bottom-up reading, centered on literature. Chapter 5, on genre, includes both physical and digital genres, though the focus is on the textual products rather than the metaliteracies needed in order to access digital texts and genres (see Lotherington, 2004). Chapter 6, a convincing chapter also dealing with genre, stresses that the goal of the FL classroom is "multiple cultural literacies" (p. 139), which chapter 7 imagines by linking cultural studies, cultural literacies, and the study of literature. The final coda chapter brings the volume back to earth with questions of how to start making substantial changes in FL classrooms. It is here that Swaffar and Arens critically note that the penetration of a multiple literacies approach has been limited in both secondary school and teacher education programs. Literary examples are used in each chapter, starting with classic English literature and moving into other literatures, such as, in chapter 5, a detailed discussion of Laura Esquivel's popular novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate), which includes a comparison with the film. To their credit, the authors take on the study of pre-modern language teaching, such as Latin and Old Church Slavonic, as well as postmodern genres and contexts. I felt that the bibliography was somewhat dated; however, many classical as well as literary works are included among the older references. This...
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Abstract: This paper reports on an inservice, research-driven teacher professional development (PD) program in an elementary school in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This study differs from other work in this area as participant... more
Abstract: This paper reports on an inservice, research-driven teacher professional development (PD) program in an elementary school in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This study differs from other work in this area as participant teachers' PD is driven not by learning ...
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This article discusses a 2021 survey of French as a second language (FSL) teacher candidates (TCs) in Faculties of Education in Ontario whose practice teaching experiences were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, pivoting them into remote... more
This article discusses a 2021 survey of French as a second language (FSL) teacher candidates (TCs) in Faculties of Education in Ontario whose practice teaching experiences were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, pivoting them into remote FSL teaching and learning. The survey, which formed a component of a larger mixed method SSHRC-funded research project1, was designed to capture the varied practice teaching experiences of FSL teacher candidates in order to ascertain symmetries and asymmetries in their preferred digital practices, devices and tools for social communication, and for French language teaching and learning. Survey respondents (N=17) from different teacher education programs in universities across Ontario provided a picture of scattered and fragmented approaches to FSL digital pedagogies and hinted at a persistent reliance on traditional FSL pedagogies in the classroom. Digital preferences for teaching and learning were, interestingly, not parallel, and were anchored in ...
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While schools attempt to merge new technologies and digital literacies in curricular instruction, the social permeation of mobile digital devices, uptake of social media, and utilization of apps is far more evident in social practice.... more
While schools attempt to merge new technologies and digital literacies in curricular instruction, the social permeation of mobile digital devices, uptake of social media, and utilization of apps is far more evident in social practice. Mobile digital technologies enabling novel learning designs hold much promise for both classroom (Mahruf et al, 2010; McCombs et al, 2006), and self-access learning (Kukulska‐Hulme, 2009). However, a 2014 survey of Canadian teachers’ use of educational technologies (Mindsharelearning, 2014), confirms that the use of mobile devices in the classroom lags behind their ubiquity in social spheres. The ubiquitous app—a third party computer program designed for mobile devices, and available at minimal or no cost to the user—is less than a decade old. In 2007, Apple produced a game-changing smart phone, which was a powerful portable computer capable of wireless Internet connection (Sanford, 2015), and enabling the user to communicate interactively in context. ...
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century classroom, with its limitations in realising the New London Group’s pedagogy provoking questions in readers’ minds about how they can be overcome. There is also ample guidance, if not an explicit roadmap, throughout the book for... more
century classroom, with its limitations in realising the New London Group’s pedagogy provoking questions in readers’ minds about how they can be overcome. There is also ample guidance, if not an explicit roadmap, throughout the book for educators, educational institutions, and policy-makers who might be interested in equipping their students with skills to match the literacy and communicative demands of contemporary times. However, though the arguments in the book do inform language classroom pedagogies in immigrant-majority marginalised communities, the study does not address the resource constraints such educational institutions negotiate in their everyday operations or how teachers might utilise the parents or community as resources in the student’s education processes. Addressing such issues directly might have added to the pedagogical value of this book, something the author might consider in future works.
Research Interests: Educational Leadership, Complexity Theory, Learner Autonomy, Intercultural Education, Learning Styles, and 15 moreLinguistics, First Language Acquisition, Gifted Education, Knowledge building, Global education, Emergent Literacy, Multiliteracies, Motivation, Curriculum Design and Evaluation, Language Studies, Beliefs and attitudes, Pedagogical Innovation, International Collaboration, Analyzing Multimodal Texts, and Design and Assessment of Educational Material
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Linguistic communication has moved beyond simple alphabetic encoding to multimedia design, challenging the fit of structural theories of language to digital communication. This transition is barely evident in mobile language learning... more
Linguistic communication has moved beyond simple alphabetic encoding to multimedia design, challenging the fit of structural theories of language to digital communication. This transition is barely evident in mobile language learning contexts where top-selling apps present language as a linguistic structure to be drilled, ironically bypassing the complex communicative potential of smart devices. This chapter overviews changing language norms from language as structure to language within multimodality and comparatively discusses multimodality from a social semiotics paradigm nested in linguistic theory and from Elleström’s intermediality paradigm. To illustrate how one could conceptualize multimodality from a perspective decentred from linguistics and leveraged to explain language use in multimedia contexts, the author examines two novel features of digital communication:emojiandconversational digital agents.
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Executive Summary Learning Connections (LC) is an online professional development community project modeled on and supported by the Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning (ABEL) Program at York University and funded by the Ontario Literacy... more
Executive Summary Learning Connections (LC) is an online professional development community project modeled on and supported by the Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning (ABEL) Program at York University and funded by the Ontario Literacy and ...
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Research Interests: Computer Science, Digital Literacy, Game Development, Computers in Education, Computers, and 11 moreEditing, Subject Areas, Reading and writing, Interactive Learning Environment, Student Performance, Computer Game, Information Presentation, Control Group, Multimedia/hypermedia systems, Improving Classroom Teaching, and Experimental Group
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The New London Group’s 1996 manifesto was a clarion call to educational researchers to fundamentally redesign language and literacy education for the needs of global learners communicating in evolving digital media environments. In this... more
The New London Group’s 1996 manifesto was a clarion call to educational researchers to fundamentally redesign language and literacy education for the needs of global learners communicating in evolving digital media environments. In this conceptual overview, the “how”, “what” and “why” of multiliteracies are critically re examined from the perspective of mobile digital language learning in posthumanist media ecologies, with attention drawn to paradigm shifts in language, technology, multimodality and context. We argue that Web 3.0 environments, AI and rapidly emerging algorithmic cultures have outpaced earlier critical theorizations of multiliteracies and digitally mediated learning practices as well as meaningful implementation of multiliteracies pedagogies in schools. We then reconsider the affordances and constraints of Web 3.0 tools for multilingual/plurilingual language learning, and sketch pathways for critical and productive engagements with mobile devices and multiliteracies ...
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Language policy is de facto as well as de jure (Shohamy, 2006). In Ontario, de jure policy limits the linguistic media of communication in the classroom to English and French, following the Official Languages Act. For the most part,... more
Language policy is de facto as well as de jure (Shohamy, 2006). In Ontario, de jure policy limits the linguistic media of communication in the classroom to English and French, following the Official Languages Act. For the most part, spaces for nonofficial minority languages, encapsulated under the rubric: international languages, are found in the marginalia of public education—after school in heritage cum international language classes, or in limited high school options where European languages such as German and Spanish make their way into traditional language object study. Policy, though, is also de facto, invisibly forged through social practice. Without intervention, schools can and do support attitudinal biases against nonofficial language use. Numerous teachers at Joyce Public School in Toronto can recall incidents where newcomers to Canada were singled out in the classroom and bullied for their perceived lack of English. Interestingly stories extend to supply teachers as well as children. In this city, where over 50% of all children entering school speak a language other than English or French at home, all public schools welcome a slice of the super-diverse urban population that has come to characterize this city. Every class is linguistically diverse. At Joyce Public School, about 2/3 of children speak a nonofficial minority language at home. Teachers participating in school-university research to develop socially responsive literacy education banded together to design and teach cross-curricular projects that focused on the theme of respect. This presentation describes how the culture of an elementary school changed over the course of a 10-year collaborative action research project (2002-2012) and outlines the positive collateral effects in its de facto language policy.
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Linguistic communication has moved beyond simple alphabetic encoding to multimedia design, challenging the fit of structural theories of language to digital communication. This transition is barely evident in mobile language learning... more
Linguistic communication has moved beyond simple alphabetic encoding to multimedia design, challenging the fit of structural theories of language to digital communication. This transition is barely evident in mobile language learning contexts where top-selling apps present language as a linguistic structure to be drilled, ironically bypassing the complex communicative potential of smart devices. This chapter overviews changing language norms from language as structure to language within multimodality and comparatively discusses multimodality from a social semiotics paradigm nested in linguistic theory and from Elleström’s intermediality paradigm. To illustrate how one could conceptualize multimodality from a perspective decentred from linguistics and leveraged to explain language use in multimedia contexts, the author examines two novel features of digital communication:emojiandconversational digital agents.
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Early childhood education is intrinsically multimodal. The kindergarten discovery orientation to learning emphasizes play and embodied multisensory learning, but this is traditionally retracted as children gain control of alphabetic print... more
Early childhood education is intrinsically multimodal. The kindergarten discovery orientation to learning emphasizes play and embodied multisensory learning, but this is traditionally retracted as children gain control of alphabetic print in the early grades. The introduction of digital tools and networks is more recent in elementary education. Digital mediation affords a powerful lens on hands-on learning, augmenting, expanding, and complicating multimodal learning and introducing new tools, textual products, and spaces for reflection and communication. Digital multimodal literacies also challenge fundamental assumptions about the starting point of emergent literacy, which is assumed to be the ABCs.
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The Grade 5 teachers at an urban elementary school in Toronto have planned their annual project within an ongoing action research study to co-design innovative pedagogies for plurilingual, multimodal literacies. Over a decade, our... more
The Grade 5 teachers at an urban elementary school in Toronto have planned their annual project within an ongoing action research study to co-design innovative pedagogies for plurilingual, multimodal literacies. Over a decade, our university-school learning community worked intensively but below the policy radar on reinventing elementary education for the culturally diverse, digitally-savvy student population the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) serves. Over half of all students in the TDSB enter school as speakers of languages other than English or French; at Joyce Public School, that percentage is much higher. The teachers are planning to have their grade 5 students design their own worlds this year. It is a bold project, inviting the chaos of ontological creation into quotidian learning. At this elementary school in northwest Toronto, teachers truly did rebuild their own pedagogical world—one of plurilingual welcome for community schoolchildren in a school system designed for...
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!is chapter explores the educational gap between contemporary cyberspace communications that bring youth of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds together in an era of local-global synergies, and resources and approaches used in... more
!is chapter explores the educational gap between contemporary cyberspace communications that bring youth of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds together in an era of local-global synergies, and resources and approaches used in English language and literacy teaching and testing, and questions the political agenda to gate-keep restrictive literacy attainment which creates unhelpful divisions between L1 and L2 users. !e authors raise relevant communicative issues for second language users in this discussion of contemporary digital genres and platforms that are growing in global popularity, such as contending with the shi"ing orthographic conventions used in digital conversations which at the same time facilitate conversational practice free from the stigma of an identifying “foreign” accent.
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In recent years there has been increased academic and professional interest and awareness in approaches to English language teaching (ELT) that take a plurilingual approach. This is often combined with a multimodal stance. The outcome of... more
In recent years there has been increased academic and professional interest and awareness in approaches to English language teaching (ELT) that take a plurilingual approach. This is often combined with a multimodal stance. The outcome of this combination is an approach to English language teaching that integrates multiple languages and multiple semiotic resources. This paper examines how a plurilingual approach to ELT can be viewed through a multimodal lens by analyzing the construction of a plurilingual talking book created as a student project in an elementary public school. The analysis uses multimodal analysis software to map the interaction of languages and images, in order to determine how these function as meaning-making resources in a multimodal, multiple-language text created by linguistically diverse students with high ELT needs. The findings indicate how combinations of different semiotic resources work together to create meaning, delineates the role of English in meaning...
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Although English is a colonial heritage in Fiji, it links the country's different ethnic groups and is the language of instruction for formal education. This paper examines pedagogical and cultural implications of the present primary... more
Although English is a colonial heritage in Fiji, it links the country's different ethnic groups and is the language of instruction for formal education. This paper examines pedagogical and cultural implications of the present primary English curriculum, based on findings from an empirical study of primary English teaching in Fiji. It reviews the materials and methodology in large-scale use in the country and demonstrates how present English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teaching is at odds with both curriculum aims and childreli's real needs for ESL skills. Innovations in teaching methods and materials are discussed. Contains 8 references. (LB)
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Although English is a colonial heritage in Fiji, it links the country's different ethnic groups and is the language of instruction for formal education. This paper examines pedagogical and cultural implications of the present primary... more
Although English is a colonial heritage in Fiji, it links the country's different ethnic groups and is the language of instruction for formal education. This paper examines pedagogical and cultural implications of the present primary English curriculum, based on findings from an empirical study of primary English teaching in Fiji. It reviews the materials and methodology in large-scale use in the country and demonstrates how present English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teaching is at odds with both curriculum aims and childreli's real needs for ESL skills. Innovations in teaching methods and materials are discussed. Contains 8 references. (LB) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
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For several years children at Joyce Public School have been rewriting traditional stories from localized cultural and linguistic perspectives, creating innovative, individualized narrative forms with digital technology. Our experimental... more
For several years children at Joyce Public School have been rewriting traditional stories from localized cultural and linguistic perspectives, creating innovative, individualized narrative forms with digital technology. Our experimental multiliteracies research project is a collaboration of school and university teachers and researchers following a guided action research paradigm. The study has as one of its stated objectives the development of multilingual story retelling as a means of inexpensively supporting home language maintenance, fostering language awareness and aiding English as a second language learning in a community of high linguistic diversity. This paper tells our story thus far, focusing on how we have approached the creation of multilingual stories in heterogeneous, urban language classes, discussing stumbling blocks that have forced creative problem-solving and showcasing successes.
Research Interests: Psychology, Information Technology, Teaching English as a Second Language, Action Research, Applied Linguistics, and 9 moreFirst Language Acquisition, Writing systems, Emergent Literacy, Multiliteracies, Curriculum Design and Evaluation, Tales, Metalinguistics, Analyzing Multimodal Texts, and Design and Assessment of Educational Material
ABSTRACT LITERACY HAS CHANGED. In the 21st century, we access interactive texts via ubiquitous portable digital devices, making texts – and the ability to use or create them – collaborative, mobile and complex. To prepare children for... more
ABSTRACT LITERACY HAS CHANGED. In the 21st century, we access interactive texts via ubiquitous portable digital devices, making texts – and the ability to use or create them – collaborative, mobile and complex. To prepare children for present and future literacy needs, we need to revise how we frame and teach literacy. The new comprehensive literacy combines digital multimodal literacies and print-based reading and writing practices. But how do we change the literacy teaching paradigm?