View Content #23153

by Stephanie Knight, CASLS Assistant Director

Raise your hand if you can analyze and discuss literary devices in the target language with fluency.

Raise your hand if you would rather write three formal essays in the target language than one short email to a person you don’t know.

See that person standing there with both hands raised? It’s 22-year-old me.

When I completed my undergraduate studies in Spanish, I was a product of a system. In this system, a palpable temptation exists to equate literacy with the ability to unpack, analyze, and produce texts that are specific to the academic sphere of life (i.e., novels, poetry, and essays). Certainly, contemporary approaches to education recognize that the impartment of literacy skills is the responsibility of educators across content areas, but the contexts of communication explored oftentimes remain firmly academic and formal. While it is critical to explore such contexts, these contexts do not permeate all facets of life.

Particularly when considering L2 learners with little access to language acquisition opportunities in other, more familiar contexts, educators must actively explore and analyze a wide spectrum of texts (both written and spoken) in the classroom. Equally as important is that they engage in this exploration while making sure not to inadvertently value the formal over the familiar. Otherwise, learners are likely to develop into linguistic facsimiles of my college-graduate self; they will be L2 users with sufficient knowledge and fluency to handle complex language but with considerable holes in practice preventing fluent communication from happening in other, less academic contexts.

For practitioners, avoiding such a fate in our students requires unpacking the context of as many text types as possible across modes. While it would be impossible to expose learners to detailed analysis and production of every text type, in every context, in every communicative mode, educators can empower learners to recognize and evaluate context within all text types. One approach to this empowerment of learners is exemplified by the acronym T-FOAM. Using this acronym in class helps learners to bolster their literacy skills by unpacking context when reading and when producing.

Certainly, one should not expect his or her class to unpack the acronym in one day. The skills that are necessary to fully answer, consider, and address the associated questions take time and persistence to develop. As a result, the best approach to implementing the acronym (or one like it) in the class is to consider it consistently throughout the course’s duration, both when analyzing texts and when producing them.