Chantelle Warner | University of Arizona (original) (raw)

Papers by Chantelle Warner

Foreign Language Annals, 2022

The Challenge Multiliteracies frameworks have advocated for understanding language use and learni... more The Challenge Multiliteracies frameworks have advocated for understanding language use and learning as active engagement in practices of meaning design, which has spurred a renewed interest in creative literacy activities. But how can scholars, educators, and curriculum developers conceptualize creative language in ways that help them to integrate it in their classrooms and curricula with intentionality?

Linguistics and Education, 2022

While the shift to remote teaching at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was experienced across a... more While the shift to remote teaching at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was experienced across all sectors of higher education, university-level foreign language teachers were impacted in particular ways. Interpersonal communication, such as discussion of students’ daily lives and their feelings, is integral to language classroom discourse. The decreases in foreign language enrollments and threats to programs the in U.S. in recent decades have also connected emotion labor to other professional discourses of relevance to language educators, namely those related to recruitment and retention. What has been called “teaching-as-caring” is thus central to language teachers’ work (e.g., Miller & Gkonou, 2018 & 2021). The collective and aggregate crises of the COVID pandemic provide a complex context for studying questions of how professional imperatives to enact these forms of emotion labor are experienced by teachers of languages other than English. This interview-based study thus examines the experiences of university language instructors during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak. The participants were 19 educators of various languages at institutions of higher education across the U.S. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed qualitatively. Findings reveal the salience of three interconnected feeling rules. The participants routinely enacted and navigated emotion labor as institutionalized and internalized expectations for maintaining personal contact with students, creating a sense of community, and regulating student feelings in ways that emerged from and extended beyond practices directly related to language teaching. The article concludes with implications for expanding the scope of research on emotion labor in language teaching and for the kinds of professional support offered to both pre- and in-service educators.

Second Language Research & Practice, 2021

Contemporary approaches to second language and culture education often emphasize the importance o... more Contemporary approaches to second language and culture education often emphasize the importance of meaningful experiences, which in the case of instructed language learning, has prompted interest in pedagogies that allow learners to engage with acts of doing and creating that go beyond language practice. Project-based learning, which gives learners opportunities to solve a problem or develop a product relatively autonomously, remains one of the main models for what this can look like in the classroom. Some recent studies have suggested that project-based pedagogies coupled with literacy-oriented approaches can also foster learners’ awareness of discourse and how language choices index identities within a given community (e.g., Michelson, 2019). This study contributes to these conversations by exploring how project-based learning coupled with ideas from contemporary literacy studies can engage a range of multisensory meaning-making resources, which afford learners rich opportunities to experiment with their own positions vis-a-vis aspects of the language and culture they are studying. Based on three case studies from an intermediate Italian class, the article shows how some students worked within and beyond the parameters of the project—a multi-week research project on a cultural topic of the students’ choosing—to fashion for themselves translingual and transcultural subjectivities (Kramsch, 2009), with personal relationships to the Italian language and culture. The article concludes with implications for project-based pedagogies that approach literacy as lived experience that goes beyond texts, as well as for future research that considers literacy activities as multisensory.

Critical Multilingualism Studies , 2021

The foundation of this study is a contrastive analysis of mainstream discourses of the learning o... more The foundation of this study is a contrastive analysis of mainstream discourses of the learning of languages other than English (LOTEs) in the U.S. and some of the alternative ways in which individuals enrolled in university language programs imagine the multilingual futures that might be afforded to them through the study of a new language. The data for the first part includes public-facing documents from three discourse planes: popular news media, public documents from governmental agencies and NGOs, and public-facing advocacy from language educators themselves. For the latter part, the article relies upon data from case studies of four students at U.S. institutions of higher learning: two learners of Italian and two of Mandarin, all in some sense embodying underrepresented identities in university education and second language research. These analyses reveal that in contrast to the prevalent commodifying discourses, the student participants experience language learning not as first and formemost the acquition of a disembodied skill, but as deeply ensconced in their social, affective, and moral lives in ways that extend beyond economic interests. Through the exploration of the contrast between these two data sets, it is argued that the treatment of multilingualism as a commodifiable skill perpetuates the ideological double standard (Pavlenko, 2002) that foreign language learning is the privilege of certain individuals, and consequently, leads to the misrecognition of language learners’ actual intentions and desires. The article concludes with a discussion of possible implications for the ways in which educators and language advocates might frame the learning of languages other than English.

Unterrichtspraxis, 2021

Because of their presumably familiar plot lines and character tropes, the Grimm Brothers' fairy t... more Because of their presumably familiar plot lines and character tropes, the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales are often included as one of the earliest literary selections in German language and culture curricula. However, for learners to engage more critically and interpretively with fairy-tale genres, it is exactly their assumed familiarity with the classical versions that needs to be challenged. At the same time-and as multiliteracies approaches to language teaching can help explicate-, 19 th-century narrative conventions are linguistically and stylistically quite removed from the communicative and literacy practices typically encountered in the beginning levels of instruction, and the leap in discursive complexity from more everyday genres to even more familiar fairy tales requires pedagogical support. This article reports on a global simulation unit that was developed and implemented in a fourth-semester German course focused on fairy tales to address these pedagogical concerns. Students were asked to not only read about but to live out the fairytale worlds and personas depicted in the Grimms' tales by engaging in perspective taking and world building activities, as they adopted a character from a Grimms' fairy tale.

Intercultural Communication Education, 2021

Find whole volume here: https://www.castledown.com/journals/ice/view-issue/?volume=4&issue=1 As ... more Find whole volume here: https://www.castledown.com/journals/ice/view-issue/?volume=4&issue=1

As we write the introduction to this Special Issue on mobility and immobility as it relates to intercultural communication education, we are rounding out the first year living with the COVID-19 pandemic. We (Beatrice and Chantelle) both sit in Tucson, Arizona, working remotely from our homes just several miles apart, using the same forms of telecollaboration and digitally mediated communication technologies we rely on to meet with colleagues in Columbia, France, Austria, and China. The irony of editing an Issue on mobility while effectively in a state of lockdown is not lost on us; only weeks before we began to draft the call for papers, we had been organizing the international conference that inspired it, the 7th International Conference on the Development and Assessment of Intercultural Competence hosted by the Center for Educational Resources for Culture,
Language, and Literacy (CERCLL), with 303 participants from 18 countries in attendance (including a few of the authors in this Issue). Although we could not have possibly predicted how the events of 2020 would unfold, both the more virtual forms of that now enable our ability to stay safely
put at home and more metaphorical extensions of movement found in media discourses on language learning as virtual travel were very much a part of the original conceptualization at that time. The motivation behind this Special Issue was born out of a sense that the relationship between mobility and intercultural communication education was due for some critical attention. Even as the social phenomena collectively shorthanded as globalization have enabled participation in dispersed communities and markets, they have also laid bare in many ways the inequities that persist (see Dasli & Diaz, 2016; Sorrells, 2016; Stein, 2019); and yet, the educational and economic benefits of physical and virtual exchanges and time spent abroad are almost uniformly lauded. The pandemic has thus highlighted an already existing need for frameworks and methodologies that recognize the socioeconomic, political, identitarian, and ideological divides that shape the dynamic landscapes of intercultural communication and the opportunities disparate individuals have to move through and take up space within them.

Open Education and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching: The Rise of a New Knowledge Ecology , 2021

This chapter describes the Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday (FLLITE) Project, a... more This chapter describes the Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday (FLLITE) Project, a joint initiative of two national foreign language resource centers (US Department of Education). The project seeks to provide tools and professional development resources for FL teachers to learn how to create their own OER, which incorporates literary language, i.e., playful and creative instances of language use. The project has two interconnecting goals: 1) the creation of a professional learning community whose members (university-level faculty, language program directors, and graduate students of language, literary, and/or cultural studies) create L2 literacy-based materials in the form of open lessons for copyrighted or open texts (written, oral, visual); and 2) the development of an ecology of professional learning based on the OER Life Cycle (WikiEducator). The OER Life Cycle refers to the typical phases involved in OER development: finding content for the OER, composing the OER, adapting the OER, using the OER in class and sharing the results with the community. This process is iterative, that is, the development of an OER often leads to subsequent, derivative versions created by other developers. Importantly, the OER life cycle not only changes the OER but also the developer. In brief, the FLLITE project is guided by a hypothesis from the OER Hub’s 2014 Evidence Report: “Use of OER leads to critical reflection by educators, with evidence of improvement in their practice” (http://oerhub.net/research-outputs/reports/). In this chapter, case studies of two FLLITE participants who were graduate student instructors at the onset of their projects suggest that the creation of OER exposes teachers to new ways of thinking about language and leads them to reflect on how they conceptualize language learning and teaching.

Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches, 2020

Retellings have long been used as both a research method and a form of pedagogical intervention w... more Retellings have long been used as both a research method and a form of pedagogical intervention within the fields of literacy and second language acquisition in order to better understand and facilitate the comprehension processes of readers (e.g. Goodman 1982). Within interculturally-orientated applied linguistics, literary retellings have also been used in order to consider the emerging positions and identities of individuals who are learning to navigate new symbolic and cultural landscapes in a second or additional language (e.g. Kramsch and Nolden 1994; Kramsch 1996). The present study builds off of this earlier research and also draws from work in contemporary stylistics and poetics in order to consider how readers who are positioned as 'foreign language learners' borrow from others' stories in the construction of their own. This study will focus on the literary compositions of two individuals, who were enrolled in an advanced German language and culture course in the United States at the time that they wrote. Within this course, students had read a series of autobiographical openings, which served as models for a creative writing task asking them to write the first page of their autobiography. The literary texts written by these students are of particular interest because of the ways in which they borrow from the hypotexts (Genette 1997) and what that reveals about the potential role of stylistics and literary imagination in the development of an intercultural stance-understood here as a sense of self and other, which includes willingness to move beyond assumptions of similarity and explore possibilities of difference (Ware and Kramsch 2005: 203).

Multilingual Online Academic Collaborations as Resistance, 2020

Deutsch als Fremdsprache, 2020

Der neue Begleitband zum Gemeinsamen europaischen Referenzrahmen for Sprachen (GeR) enthalt drei ... more Der neue Begleitband zum Gemeinsamen europaischen Referenzrahmen for Sprachen (GeR) enthalt drei neue Skalen for plurilinguale und plurikulturelle Kompetenz. Durch diese neuen Skalen wird die Konzeption
einer mehrsprachigen und interkulturellen Bildung, die im GeR schon skizziert wurde, konkretisiert. In parallelen Diskussionen der US-amerikanischen Fremdsprachendidaktik werden in den letzten Jahren vergleichbare Madelle vorgeschlagen. In diesem Beitrag werden die Skalen for plurilinguale und plurikulturelle
Kompetenz im Begleitband mit zwei einflussreichen Modellen aus dem US-amerikanischen Kontext verglichen. Der Artikel pladiert abschliefiend for einen vertieften Austausch zwischen nordamerikanischer und europaischer Seite mit dem Ziel, ein nuancierteres Modell von Interkulturalitat und Mehrsprachigkeit für den Fremdsprachenunterricht zu entwickeln.

Schlüsselworter: GeR, Begleitband, plurikulturelle Kompetenz, mehrsprachige Kompetenz, interkulturelles
Lemen, Mehrsprachigkeit, translinguale und transkulturelle Kompetenz

What do we mean by pluricultural and plurilingual competence here? Conceptualizations of intercultural education and multilingualism in the European Common Framework and in US-American Foreign Language Teaching
The new Companion Volume to the CEFR presents three new scales for plurilingual and pluricultural competence. By means of these scales the Companion Volume provides concrete examples for the conceptualization
of a multilingual and intercultural education, which was sketched out in the CEFR. In US-American foreign language education, parallel discussions have emerged in recent years and comparable models have been proposed. This article compares the scales for plurilingual and pluricultural competence in the CEFR Companion Volume with two influential North American models. The article makes the case for a more intensive exchange of ideas between North American and European scholars with the goal of developing a more nuanced model of interculturality and multilingualism for foreign language teaching.

Key words: CEFR, Companion Volume, pluricultural competence, plurilingual competence, intercultural learning, multilingualism, translingual and transcultural competence

Pragmatics and Literature, 2019

Full citation: 2019. “Mapping the Texture of the Berlin Wall: Metonymy, Layered Worlds, and Criti... more Full citation:
2019. “Mapping the Texture of the Berlin Wall: Metonymy, Layered Worlds, and Critical Implicatures in Sarah Kirsch’s Poem “Naturschutzgebiet/Nature Reserve.” Pragmatics and Literature, 165-189. Siobhan Chapman and Billy Clark (eds.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Sarah Kirsch’s 1982 poem “Naturschutzgebiet” (Nature Reserve) textually excavates the geographical space upon which a portion of the Berlin Wall stood. Through the use of metonymical references to features of the past and present landscape, the fifteen-line poem is dense with words that seem to simultaneously index multiple moments in the history of this place. For readers privy to these references, this potentially creates a poetic texture (Stockwell, 2009) characterized by the layering of text worlds (Gavins, 2007) corresponding to actual worlds, which overlap in space but not in historical time. A key pragmatic effect for many readers is a range
of stronger and weaker socially critical implicatures related to the Berlin Wall and the East German regime that built it.

Kirsch’s poem provides an ideal case study for how cognitive-pragmatic
theories of metonymy can help us to understand how readers’ experiences of poetic texts are connected to their conceptualization of past and present social and physical realities and how this in turn can result in socially critical implicatures. While cognitive poetic models of texture and text world theory provide models for understanding the role of metonymy as a world building element, pragmatic theories of implicature and relevance conceptualize its potential effects within a broader account of utterance interpretation. In what follows, I summarize models of texture and text world theory from cognitive poetics, before turning to a discussion
of metonymy. I will briefly introduce cognitive linguistic and relevance theoretic approaches to metonymy, before turning to the cognitive-pragmatic framework that will be the focus of this chapter. I will then analyse Sarah Kirsch’s poem as an example of a text that relies heavily on metonymy in the enactment of and manipulation of past and present realities. Based on this analysis, I will argue that cognitive linguistic models of metonymy and cognitive poetic models of text worlds can help us to describe the types of mapping that occur as a reader experiences
the poem, but to account for the ambivalent socially critical implicatures
inferred by some readers requires a pragmatic theory of relevance.

IDV-Magazin, 2019

Etwa 6% der Amerikaner, die eine Fremdsprache lernen, lernen Deutsch, und die große Mehrheit von ... more Etwa 6% der Amerikaner, die eine Fremdsprache lernen, lernen Deutsch, und die große Mehrheit von diesen Deutschlernern fängt erst an einer Universität oder einem College damit an. Viele dieser Sprachkurse, besonders an großen, öffentlichen Institutionen, werden nicht von den ProfessorInnen, sondern von anderen StudentInnen, d.h. Masterstudierenden und DoktorandInnen, unterrichtet. Die Universitäten bekommen also günstige Lehrkräfte, und die Graduate-StudentInnen verdienen ein mäßiges Gehalt, bezahlen keine Studiengebühren und gewinnen Berufserfahrung. Ein wesentlicher Bestandteil des Studiums ist für Graduate-StudentInnen in den USA also das Unterrichten. Jedoch ist die Verbindung zwischen ihrer Rolle als StudentIn und als Lehrerkraft manchmal unklar und kompliziert, besonders für diejenigen, die Germanistik o. Ä. studieren (im Vergleich mit denen, die Fremdsprachenpädagogik oder Angewandte Linguistik als Schwerpunkt haben). Diese Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) stehen oft mitten in einer Debatte über den Auftrag und curriculare Artikulation von German-Studies-Programmen an amerikanischen Universitäten. In diesem Beitrag wird die heutige Situation der Graduate Student Instructors, ihre Ausbildung und ihre Rolle in der Zukunft der amerikanischen German Studies durch eine Zusammenfassung des aktuellen Forschungsstands dargestellt. Der zweite Teil des Artikels berichtet von Fallstudien mit GSIs aus zwei universitären Deutschprogrammen und schließt mit Implikationen für die Lehrerausbildung von Graduate Studenten, d.h. von zukünftigen DeutschprofessorInnen, ab.

Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 2019

One of the primary struggles for scholars and practitioners of instructed foreign languages today... more One of the primary struggles for scholars and practitioners of instructed foreign languages today is how to best teach language as discourse in all its complexity. Digital games, as massively semiotic ecologies, arguably offer a unique opportunity for language learners to experience that complexity in action. This article provides a model for teaching language as discourse in action through digital games, as a means of presenting language learners with opportunities to experience the complexity of text, genre and discourse. The model integrates three levels of discourse essential to digital gaming: (1) the designs of the games, (2) the interactions between gamers, both those that take part in the gaming platform (such as in-game chats) and those between participants in the classroom and (3) social discourses about gaming.

AILA Review , 2019

“Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World” (2007) dissatisfacti... more “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed
World” (2007) dissatisfaction with the “two-tiered configuration” of US foreign language departments has become increasingly vocal. While the target of the criticism is often the curriculum, it has often been noted that programmatic bifurcations mirror institutional hierarchies, e.g. status differences between specialists in literary and cultural studies and experts in applied linguistics and language pedagogy (e.g. Maxim et al., 2013; Allen & Maxim, 2012). This chapter looks at the two-tiered structure of collegiate modern language departments from the perspectives of the transdisciplinary shape-shifters who maneuver within them – scholars working between applied linguistics and literary studies. These individuals must negotiate the methodologies and the institutional positions available to them – in many instances, the latter is what has prompted them to work between fields in the first place. The particular context of US foreign language and literature departments serves as a case study of the lived experiences of doing transdisciplinary work in contexts that are characterized by disciplinary hierarchies and the chapter ends with a call for applied linguistics to consider not only the epistemic, but also the institutional and affective labor needed to sustain transdisciplinary work.

L2 Journal , 2018

This special volume on “Living Literacies” is an addendum to an existing body of work in L2 educa... more This special volume on “Living Literacies” is an addendum to an existing body of work in L2 education that has amassed over the past few decades, which makes a collective case that literacy ought to be a central pedagogical objective for language and culture curricula. This has been a particularly predominant discourse in collegiate foreign language teaching, where the calls for a paradigm shift are often directly coupled with critiques of the bifurcated curricular models that have long shaped foreign language departments (e.g., Allen & Paesani, 2010; Kern, 2000, 2003), though interest in L2 literacy over the past couple of decades has also been associated with broader discussions around advanced linguistic development (e.g., Byrnes, 2005; Byrnes, Maxim, & Norris, 2010; Maxim, 2009) and in particular, language learning for specific or academic purposes (Hyland, 2007; Yasuda, 2011).

The articles in this volume contribute to these ongoing discussions by focusing more specifically on the complexity of L2 literacy, not merely as the interpretation and production of material texts, but also as lived experience: as practices that manifest across multiple languages, cultural contexts, and social ecologies; as a means of accessing and of developing identities, for example as a speaker of a new language, a researcher in a new field, or a language teacher working within a particular approach; as constituent of social sites, within which texts and text-based activities unfold.

THE " changed world " indicated in the title of the 2007 MLA report " Foreign Languages and Highe... more THE " changed world " indicated in the title of the 2007 MLA report " Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World " marks a shifting affective reality for foreign language educators. Suddenly, with the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the ensuing United States military engagements, there was a heightened recognition at federal levels that the United States had a deficit, a crisis, in language and international expertise, especially in key critical languages needed desperately for defense. The authors of the report could not have anticipated that less than a year after its publication, the United States would be hit by another crisis—the recession in 2008. As state legislatures embraced a rhetoric of austerity and many universities followed suit, the need to validate our role in the enterprise of the university was felt keenly by those of us in the modern language and humanities departments across the country. This state of systemic crisis has become a defining narrative for foreign language, literature, and culture departments in the United States. The combined pressures of a language deficit and an economic crisis have created a narrative in which there is this phenomenon, a " language crisis, " which looms because of the potentially precarious positioning of American graduates in tomorrow's world, which is primarily shaped by defense initiatives and the global market. The logical conclusion drawn from these converging narratives of crisis is that foreign language departments must optimize their curricula so that they can provide access to the language and culture resources students will need in the most cost-effective and efficient way possible—or risk downsizing and closure. The morals of the crisis narrative align well with the " regimes of anticipation " that pervades postrecession university culture (Adams et al. 247); indeed, a wide range of laudable efforts and initiatives in foreign language education have been developed in response to these pressures. However, advocating for the study of foreign languages, literatures, and cultures from an affective position of perpetual crisis all too often results in what Berlant describes as " cruel optimism " : " a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility " (21). The modes of prediction , optimization, and instrumentality preferred by regimes of anticipation differ importantly from the kinds of needs analysis and backward design familiar to those of us in language pedagogy because they are tethered to preordained interests and value sets—perceived immediate threats to national security, an imagined corporate world within which students will need to compete. Securing the best possible future risks becoming less about education in any transformative sense and more about checking off boxes and shoring up skill sets. Even more cruelly, arguments grounded in globalization and optimization more often than not lead to conclusions that

Foreign Language Annals, 2018

Challenges Texts are never culturally neutral, but rather are embedded in, and shaped by, histori... more Challenges Texts are never culturally neutral, but rather are embedded in, and shaped by, histories and contexts, language, speech communities, modes, and text types. How does such a multi-literacies approach enable learners to explore not only new words, but new worlds, and to view reading and writing as complementary linguistic processes? Abstract In recent years, literacy has emerged as a key critical term in foreign language (FL) teaching and learning. This essay reflects on the history of literacy and on current developments , in particular those related to the development of multiliteracies paradigms. The article concludes with a discussion of emergent topics related to literacy and language teaching and suggests ways in which research in these domains is posing new questions for the field of FL education.

Foreign Language Annals, 2022

Linguistics and Education, 2022

Second Language Research & Practice, 2021

Critical Multilingualism Studies , 2021

Unterrichtspraxis, 2021

Intercultural Communication Education, 2021

Find whole volume here: https://www.castledown.com/journals/ice/view-issue/?volume=4&issue=1 As ... more Find whole volume here: https://www.castledown.com/journals/ice/view-issue/?volume=4&issue=1

Open Education and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching: The Rise of a New Knowledge Ecology , 2021

Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches, 2020

Multilingual Online Academic Collaborations as Resistance, 2020

Deutsch als Fremdsprache, 2020

Schlüsselworter: GeR, Begleitband, plurikulturelle Kompetenz, mehrsprachige Kompetenz, interkulturelles
Lemen, Mehrsprachigkeit, translinguale und transkulturelle Kompetenz

Key words: CEFR, Companion Volume, pluricultural competence, plurilingual competence, intercultural learning, multilingualism, translingual and transcultural competence

Pragmatics and Literature, 2019

IDV-Magazin, 2019

Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 2019

AILA Review , 2019

L2 Journal , 2018

Foreign Language Annals, 2018

This educators’ handbook on Foreign Languages in the Literary in the Everyday (FLLITE) is a culmi... more This educators’ handbook on Foreign Languages in the Literary in the Everyday (FLLITE) is a culmination of ideas, resources, and pedagogies that have been developed over the past several years as a collaboration between Joanna Luks, Carl Blyth, Chantelle Warner, and the many materials designers, workshop participants, and students who have been a part of the FLLITE project.

By exploring and exploiting the apparent tension between the literary and the everyday, the FLLITE approach provides teachers and students with a set of tools to think with as they navigate the connections between language forms and meanings as they are shaped not only through sets of conventions, but also creative, playful interventions.

For those new to the FLLITE project, the handbook serves as an introduction to the concepts and possible applications of the approach.

For teachers at all levels, the handbook provides ideas for how to enhance a unit or a course by adding elements of FLLITE.

For Language Program Directors and curriculum designers, the handbook provides a starting point for articulating a curricular arc across multiple courses.

For those involved in graduate student professional development, this handbook can be used whole or excerpted to assist Graduate Student Instructors to see connections between their teaching in the beginning levels and other courses they will be asked to teach further in their careers.

In this book, Warner examines a number of German-language literary autobiographies that are conne... more In this book, Warner examines a number of German-language literary autobiographies that are connected to diverse social movements of the last forty years. These books have all received critical attention from the popular press, topped bestseller lists, and have been pivotal in discussions of authenticity, subjectivity, and referentiality. Because of the thematic diversity of these works, scholars within literary and cultural studies have tended to treat them separately under topical categories, such as women’s literature, the post-war generation, migration and multiculturalism, etc. Underlying Warner’s analysis is the belief that the social construction of autobiographical acts is as much a matter of textuality as it is of topicality i.e., how language means, rather than what it means, and that a pragmatic-stylistic approach is well-suited to describing how literary autobiographies come to function as testimonies to certain collective experiences.

By presenting a model for an integrative stylistics approach, The Prgamatics of Literary Testimony participates in current discussions within fields of literary linguistic scholarship, as well as autobiographical theory. In its analysis of key examples of German social testimonies from the late twentieth century, this book incorporates insights from discourse analysis, pragmatics, cogntive poetics, and sociolinguistics in order to demonstrate that this diverse body of works constitutes a particular form of textual practice defined by what the author calls authenticity effects—feelings of realism, immediacy, exemplarity, genuineness, and social relevance. Such a study of authenticity as a poetic effect, can help us to better understand the testimonial glamour owned by various types of autobiographical narration.

The playful, creative moments in everyday language use are an opportunity for fostering students’... more The playful, creative moments in everyday language use are an opportunity for fostering students’ ability to communicate and express themselves in their new language.This project, co-sponsored by CERCLL and COERLL creates an archive of authentic texts in different languages accompanied by lessons, which teachers can access, adapt, and use, along with supporting professional development resources.
Project leaders: Joanna Luks, Carl Blyth, and Chantelle Warner

The importance of cultural literacy and transcultural competence, the ability to understand a for... more The importance of cultural literacy and transcultural competence, the ability to understand a foreign language and culture on its own terms, has become a pressing issue in foreign language pedagogy in this current age of globalization where meanings traffic easily but superficially. However, the teaching of language in culture comes with its own set of pedagogical problems.

This project--funded with a grant from the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy--created culturally annotated hypermedia texts in Arabic, German, Portuguese, and Turkish, as well as pedagogical materials to accompany them with the goal of developing new pedagogies for the teaching of language as culture through literary texts.

A number of recent studies have focused on the use of annotation in multimedia environments for enhancing L2 text comprehension and promoting vocabulary acquisition and have reported that prior knowledge is integral to reading processes. By decentering the cultural background information that is provided to the students through hypermedia annotation, the pedagogical materials created in this project, seek to promote cultural literacy through the “interpretive mode,” “the ability to read (or listen) between the lines.

Mapping the texture of the Berlin Wall: metonymy, layered worlds, and critical implicatures in Sarah Kirsch’s poem “Naturschutzgebiet/Nature Reserve”, 2019

Sarah Kirsch’s 1982 poem “Naturschutzgebiet” (Nature Reserve) textually excavates the geographica... more Sarah Kirsch’s 1982 poem “Naturschutzgebiet” (Nature Reserve) textually excavates the geographical space upon which a portion of the Berlin Wall stood. Through the use of metonymical references to features of the past and present landscape, the fifteen-line poem is dense with words that seem to simultaneously index multiple moments in the history of this place. For readers privy to these references, this potentially creates a poetic texture (Stockwell, 2009) characterized by the layering of text worlds (Gavins, 2007) corresponding to actual worlds, which overlap in space but not in historical time. A key pragmatic effect for many readers is a range of stronger and weaker socially critical implicatures related to the Berlin Wall and the East German regime that built it. [...] Kirsch’s poem provides an ideal case study for how cognitive-pragmatic theories of metonymy can help us to understand how readers’ experiences of poetic texts are connected to their conceptualization of past and present social and physical realities and how this in turn can result in socially critical implicatures...

In the ten years since the Modern Language Association published their report, “Foreign Languages... more In the ten years since the Modern Language Association published their report, “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World” (2007) dissatisfaction with the “two-tiered configuration” of US foreign language departments has become increasingly vocal. While the target of the criticism is often the curriculum, it has often been noted that programmatic bifurcations mirror institutional hierarchies, e.g. status differences between specialists in literary and cultural studies and experts in applied linguistics and language pedagogy (e.g. Maxim et al;, 2013Allen & Maxim, 2012).Curricular models which reimagine the desired learning outcomes of collegiate foreign language programs in terms of design awareness (Kern, 2000), “textual thinking” (e.g. Maxim, 2009),and even “literary thinking” (e.g. Richardson, 2016) seem to call for scholars who work at least at some level across literary studies and applied linguistics—a trend that is evidenced in recent job postings in the modern language humanities fields; however, the translation of the transdisciplinary work of these scholars into recognizable research tracks within existing institutional is often ad hoc and at times precarious.

This paper looks at the two-tiered structure of collegiate modern language departments from the perspective of the transdisciplinary shape shifters who maneuver within them—scholars working between applied linguistics and literary studies. These individuals must negotiate the methodologies and the institutional positions available to them—in many instances, the latter is what has prompted them to work between fields in the first place. A key consideration of this paper will be the lived experience of doing transdisciplinary work in contexts that are characterized by disciplinary hierarchies, and thus the primary sources will be interviews conducted with individuals at various career levels from doctoral students on up and autoethnographic reflections from the presenter.

This excerpt is taken from a 2016 workshop on The FLLITE Approach: Lesson Design, Assessment, and... more This excerpt is taken from a 2016 workshop on The FLLITE Approach: Lesson Design, Assessment, and Publication. The workshop was co-led with Joanna Luks and Carl Blyth as part of the project Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday (fllite.org). which is sponsored by the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language, and Literacy (University of Arizona) and the Center for Open Education Resources and Language Learning (University of Texas, Austin).