Ecologies of multilingual writing in world language classrooms
Ecologies of multilingual writing is a productive lens to examine writing produced in world language instruction contexts in the United States. Multilingual writing is here understood as writing produced by learners seeking to expand their repertoire by learning a language other than English. In this sense, understanding world language instruction as ecology means to recognize that these contexts share similar challenges as they co-exist in an English-dominant environment while contending with specificities of their own linguistic and cultural ecosystems that impact the teaching of writing. For instance, learners enrolled in a world language are often more interested in developing speaking than writing skills, while world language teachers rarely have special training in teaching writing. This colloquium aims to tease apart what types of connections play a role in developing writing knowledge and skills in world languages to then analyze the relationality between language systems and cultures enacted by learners and teachers.
First, Bruna Sommer-Farias will examine how recognizing relationality of genre dimensions across languages can contribute to genre knowledge development of world language teachers and learners. The results include responses to genre awareness tasks for L2 Portuguese, Spanish and Japanese. Then, Francis Troyan will examine how an L2 French teacher sustained dialogic interactions following an SFL-informed genre-based approach using speaking-to-write/writing-to-speak activities. The results illustrate the relationality between speaking and writing and the connectedness to each person in the classroom (student-student and teacher-student) when negotiating meaning and positively motivating learners in a world language. In the sequence, Miriam Akoto will illustrate the connection between types of knowledge students make when working in collaborative writing tasks. Her work report on specific types of genre-related content L2 French learners use during group collaborative work and for what reasons they make those choices. Finally, Matt Coss will discuss the relationality between modality and writing knowledge (i.e., handwriting versus keyboarding) in the context of L2 (Chinese) writing assessments. The results emphasize the importance of understanding the relationality between modality and writing knowledge for an accurate measurement of writing knowledge and a focus on instruction that prioritizes real-world communicative goals. The colloquium concludes with Melinda Reichelt responding to the presentations and pinpointing the potential of elements mentioned by the speakers to better understand the context of writing in languages other than English.
Organizer
Bruna Sommer-Farias, Michigan State University, USA
Presenters
Bruna Sommer-Farias, Michigan State University, USA
Francis Troyan, Ohio State University, USA
Miriam Akoto, Sam Houston State University, USA
Matt Coss, Michigan State University, USA
Discussant
Melinda Reichelt, University of Toledo, USA
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