View Content #27908

By Stephanie Knight, CASLS Assistant Director

              Literacy is “a vehicle for communicating meaning” that is “always embedded in specific social circumstances” (Reinhardt and Thorne, 2019, p. 210). It is critical to social engagement in target language communities, and though digital texts provide a degree of access to L2 communities that was not commonplace just a few decades ago (in terms of both quantity and the heterogeneity of interaction types), their integration in L2 classrooms and curricula is sparce. The inherent opportunity for L2 acquisition afforded by the sheer ubiquity of opportunities to develop digital literacies is palpable; not only may learners explore and consume language that would not have even been documented in years past (McColloch, 2019), but learners are also afforded the opportunity  to  produce language themselves (Warschauer & Grimes, 2007). Despite this opportunity, in the absence of explicit analysis, learners may be unable to gain requisite pragmatic awareness for meaningful and sustained interaction in L2 communities (Reinhardt and Thorne, 2019).

              Mixed Reality Complex Learning Scenarios (MRCLSs) are one approach to incorporating the intentional development of digital literacy skills in the L2 classroom. These scenarios are based on the Intercultural Pragmatic and Interactional Competence Framework (for more information, see Sykes, Malone, Forrest, and Sağdıç, in press) and articulate four learning targets in the areas of Knowledge (the capacity to form a variety of utterances), Analysis (the ability to discern and produce utterances with the desired illocutionary force), Subjectivity (the ability to describe language choices, even especially if they do not necessarily align with expected sociopragmatic conventions), and Awareness (the ability to identify the perlocutionary forces at play in an interaction). Practitioners using and developing MRCLSs necessarily draw learners’ overt attention to these four domains by facilitating their engagement in multistep tasks (e.g. decoding of texts and solving puzzles) in which demonstrating understanding of the pragmatic strategies at play is required for sustained progression through the experience. MRCLSs are well suited facilitate learners’ exploration of digital domains such as synchronous texting, social media, blogs, and wikis in concert with related analog texts (e.g., travel brochures, maps, and infographics) that are typically more represented in instructional contexts. As such, practitioners are encouraged to expand the text types that learners engage with in their classrooms. This expansion can only be to the benefit of learners; they are primed to not only demonstrate understanding of sociopragmatic content, but to consider how to apply it across innumerable contexts.

References

McCulloch, G. (2019). Because internet: Understanding the new rules of language. Riverhead Books: New York.

Reinhardt, J. & Thorne, S. (2019). Digital Literacies as emergent multifarious repertoires. In N. Arnold & B. Ducate (Eds.), Engaging language learners through CALL: From theory and  research to informed practice (208-239). Bristol: Equinox.

Sykes, J., Malone, M., Forrest, L., & Sağdıç, A. (in press). Comprehensive framework for assessing intercultural-pragmatic competence: Knowledge, analysis, subjectivity, and awareness. Encyclopedia of Educational Innovation.

Warschauer, M., & Grimes, D. (2007). Audience, authorship, and artifact: The emergent semiotics of Web 2.0. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (27), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190508070013.