Multiliteracies in World Language Education

Yuri Kumagai, Ana López-Sánchez, Sujane Wu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138832183
• eBook ISBN: 9781317566083
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Putting a multiliteracies framework at the center of the world language curriculum, this volume brings together college-level curricular innovations and classroom projects that address differences in meaning and worldviews expressed in learners' primary and target languages. Offering a rich understanding of languages, genres, and modalities as socioculturally situated semiotic systems, it advocates an effective pedagogy for developing learners' abilities to operate between languages. Chapters showcase curricula that draw on a multiliteracies framework and present various classroom projects that develop aspects of multiliteracies for language learners.

A discussion of the theoretical background and historical development of the pedagogy of multiliteracies and its relevance to the field of world language education positions this book within the broader literature on foreign language education. As developments in globalization, accountability, and austerity challenge contemporary academia and the current structure of world language programs, this book shows how the implementation of a multiliteracies-based approach brings coherence to language programs, and how the framework can help to accomplish the goals of higher education in general and of language education in particular.

1

ADVANCING MULTILITERACIES IN WORLD LANGUAGE EDUCATION

Yuri Kumagai and Ana López-Sánchez

Globalization has been a “game-changer” bringing unprecedented change at unseen speed to all arenas of life. In the past decades, the conditions it created, together with the climate of accountability and economic austerity in education, placed significant pressure on the humanities. World/foreign language¹ academic programs were not spared and, in fact, have been subjected to these changes and pressures—some seeing their budgets drastically reduced or the entire program cut, while others (in the so-called “critical languages”) have expanded greatly. Adding to these pressures, the publication, in 2007, of the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages special report heightened the profession’s long-existing internal tensions—tensions stemming from its intellectual and structural bifurcation—and generated further questioning of departments’ missions, creating, in turn, increased attention to curricular and pedagogical issues. This re-examination of departments’ academic goals and missions, brought about by the compounded effects of internal and external factors, could ultimately bring about profound transformations in the profession. One major area where this transformation may be felt is in the restructuring of curricula.

The current division between the so-called “language” courses at the lower levels and the so-called “content” courses at the upper levels of instruction can be traced back to the middle of the 20th century, when—encouraged by national security needs—second language acquisition (SLA) developed with an emphasis on oral communication with a total disregard for the textual and interpretive concerns of the traditionally philologically inclined foreign language (FL) departments (Matsuda, 2001). With the appearance of communicative language teaching (CLT) in the 1970s, the ground was set for an even greater separation between instruction at the lower and upper levels of the curriculum. In fact, the adoption of CLT in the lower levels of the curriculum resulted in an unbalanced focus on oral communication, especially on functional and transactional language use, that undermined the role of reading and writing and, more generally, of literacy practices in the lower levels of the curriculum. In CLT classrooms, when reading did take place, it emphasized information retrieval, and it served as an excuse for vocabulary and grammar practice and as a pretext for oral communication (Homstad & Thorson, 2000; Kramsch & Nolden, 1994; Matsuda, 2001). Writing was completely neglected.

In contrast, in the upper levels of European language programs, reading and writing were traditionally at the core of a curriculum that focused on national literatures, their canonical texts, aesthetic appreciation, and critical interpretation. With the “cultural turn” of the 1980s, the focus on the interpretive remained but now expanded to include “new” types of texts (including “minoritized” literatures and other forms of cultural production, such as film). A disregard for the medium (i.e., for language and language development), however, remained a constant through the shift in focus, perpetuating the familiar divide between upper and lower levels.

In Asian language programs, this situation was and still is more extreme. While reading literature and other types of texts indeed is at the core of the upper-level curriculum, the focus of instruction has often remained at the surface level of comprehension, rarely including aesthetic or evaluative comprehension or interpretation practices (Iwasaki & Kumagai, 2008; Kumagai & Iwasaki, 2011; also Chapters 5 and 9, this volume). Moreover, reading and interpretation of canonical literature has mainly been done with texts in English translation, showing a disregard for language as a meaning-making system, and clearly marking a profound division between “language” and “content” courses. In writing instruction the primary focus has continued to be on accuracy (e.g., writing characters and grammar).

This continued separation of goals and practices resulted in the “schizophrenia with which the profession end[ed] the century,” most notably perceived “in the tension between the traditional, humanities-based, reading-oriented study of belles lettres and views advocating functionality and oral proficiency” (Bernhardt, 1998, cited in Byrnes, Maxim, & Norris, 2010, p. 3). But, by the beginning of the 21st century, with CLT having fallen short of fulfilling its original ambitious agenda (Kramsch, 2006) and losing the central stage it has long occupied, with a revised conceptualization of literacy and the literary (Kern & Schulz, 2005) in place, and with renewed calls to correct the inadequacies of the current two-tiered system—most notably and forcefully articulated in the report published by the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages (2007)—the time was ripe for a new construct to articulate and restructure world language curricula and pedagogical practices anew.

This construct is literacy, a socioculturally conceptualized literacy (e.g., Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Baynham, 1995; Gee, 1990)—i.e., understood as a social practice where the knowledge of reading and writing is “[applied] . . . for specific purposes in specific contexts of use” (Scribner & Cole, 1981, p. 236). The many scholars who have invoked the construct—most notably Byrnes and Maxim (2004), Byrnes et al. (2010), Kern (2000), and Swaffar and Arens (2005), but also others (e.g., Allen & Paesani, 2010)—have articulated their framework in distinct ways, but are informed by the same critical set of notions and assumptions. These are, namely, (1) a view of language as a socioculturally situated semiotic system (Halliday, 1978), and of language learning as a process of gaining access to meaning-making resources; (2) a curriculum that is “text”-based including written and multimodal texts; and (3) a pedagogy that emphasizes “what texts do and how texts mean rather than what they [texts] mean” (Bazerman & Prior, 2004, p. 3). The argument for this kind of literacy and its associated notions is that the continued focus on texts and textuality not only brings coherence to the programs, but also develops the learners’ ability to “operate between languages” (MLA, 2007) by addressing differences in meaning and worldviews expressed in their primary language and in the target language; and that it hones the learners’ critical thinking skills throughout the entire program. This, in turn, helps bring world language education in alignment both with the goals of the humanities and, more generally, with higher education.

The proposals put forward by the above-mentioned FL scholars can be said to generally align with Cope and Kalantzis’ (1993), and the New London Group’s (NLG, 1996) pedagogy of multiliteracies. This is a framework that emphasizes the multiplicity of languages, genres, and modalities present in any given social context, and advocates a pedagogy that puts this multiplicity at the center of the curriculum, while also honing learners’ agency, all with the goal of generating active and dynamic transformation (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009).

In the remainder of the chapter, we discuss the notion of literacy and how it is conceptualized and operationalized in the field of language education. We pay special attention to the theoretical and practical underpinnings of the pedagogy of multiliteracies, as proposed by the NLG (1996) and as later revised by Kalantzis and Cope (2005) (also Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). The constructs and notions introduced in this chapter inform the curricular proposals and the pedagogical practices presented in the individual chapters in this book, and help situate these proposals within the field of (language) education and learning.

Notions of Literacy

Literacy can be a “catch-all term” and can mean different things to different people. In the traditional, most accepted sense of the word, literacy is understood as the ability to read and write. This understanding is informed and shaped by two main perspectives: linguistic and cognitive. The linguistic perspective of literacy is concerned with the linguistic features of texts such as orthographies, vocabulary, grammar, mechanics, rhetorical organization, and genres. The cognitive (“in the head”) perspective of literacy—or what Johns (1997) calls a “learner-centered view”—is concerned with the learners’ individual cognitive development and processing when they engage in a task of reading or writing (Kern, 2000). Neither the linguistic nor the cognitive view takes into consideration the crucially important contextual factors that mediate and shape how one engages in literacy practices: the social dimension.

Research drawn from anthropology, education, linguistics, and sociolinguistics, among other disciplines, and known as New Literacy Studies (NLS) (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Gee, 1990), incorporates the social dimension, also calling forth the cultural, historical, and institutional. It also proposes that, because literacy practices vary across discourse communities and through history, it is more appropriate to talk about literacies (the plural form) (Gee, 2010, p. 168). Within this “new” sociocultural conceptualization, literacy is understood as a dynamic process that encompasses reading and writing, and the meaning resources necessary to read and write, together with the social practices in which those meanings emerged (Baynham, 1995; Gee, 1990, 2010; Heath, 1983; Street, 1995). Accordingly, accessing the meanings in a text is not a simple exercise of decoding words. It demands that one is socialized into the practices in which that text emerged, which involve “ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing,” or what Gee calls Discourses (capital D) (Gee, 1990, p. 143). As Gee put it, to be able to read and write a text of type X, we have to be socialized into the practice in which the text emerged, and for that we have to first be apprenticed into the social groups where the text emerged (Gee, 1990).

Multiliteracies

The pedagogy of multiliteracies was put forth in 1996 by a group of ten scholars from various disciplines who shared a concern for education and who came to be known as the New London Group. Their most immediate interest—as made evident in their theorization as well as the implementation of their pedagogical model in, for example, the “Learning by Design” project led by Kalantzis and Cope (2005)²—was to overcome the inertia in schools and disciplines and reverse the effects of the “back-to-basics” movements (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 182) that stifle true learning through, for example, the use of standardized testing.

But, more critically, the group was seeking to respond to the challenges and demands a world of rapidly changing social, cultural, economic, and technological conditions was placing on education. One direct consequence of the changes in these conditions, specifically resulting from the unprecedented levels of global connectedness due to migration and economic integration,³ was increased cultural and linguistic diversity, and a multiplication and diversification of discourses. A second, equally important, consequence of these changes was the proliferation of communication channels and media, particularly influenced by new (social) media technologies and platforms (e.g., internet, Facebook, YouTube, smartphone, etc.). The new technologies have often resulted in multimodal meaning-making practices “where the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, the behavioural, and so on” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 5).

To capture the multiplicity of aspects involved in literacy and to highlight the centrality of the notion for their pedagogical model, the group coined the label “multiliteracies.” The remainder of their proposal centered around the development of these multiple literacies (i.e., the “how to”). They contend that the educational space must evolve to account for these new multiple representational forms, forms that will only continue to increase and evolve, and to gain more relevance because of further globalization and further development of digital communication tools. “Effective citizenship and productive work,” Cope and Kalantzis (2000) argue, “now require that we interact effectively using multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and communication patterns that more frequently cross cultural, community and national boundaries” (p. 6). Only if educators rethink and stop privileging the written text and standard forms of language and create opportunities for students to be exposed to a multiplicity of discourses, and to produce such discourses in the classroom, will the full participation of students in public, community, and economic life be ensured (NLG, 2000, p. 9).

To develop the needed competencies in learners, the NLG engages insights drawn from the field of multimodal literacy—itself advanced in major ways by one of the members of the group—which explores the multiple semiotic resources (i.e., linguistic, visual, audio, spatial, tactile, gestural) of a textual composition (Jewitt & Kress, 2003; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), and develops meta-knowledge about how these various resources are independently and interactively used to construct different kinds of meaning (Cloonan, Kalantzis, & Cope, 2010; Kress, 2000; Unsworth, 2010; Unsworth & Bush, 2010). Visual resources, which are particularly predominant in contemporary texts and thus particularly well researched, are paid special attention (Bazalgette & Buckingham, 2013). To develop visual literacy, questions about the color, perspective, framing, and composition of images, and how meaning is made when visual resources are combined with written texts (Kress, 2000; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), are posed in the class.

Multimodal meaning-making practices are strongly (though not necessarily) associated with digital media. Understood as “the myriad social practices and conceptions of engaging in meaning-making mediated by texts that are produced, received, distributed, exchanged, etc., via digital codification” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 5), digital literacy(-ies) are a critical element of the multiliteracies pedagogy. Instructional modules featuring computer-mediated instruction (CMI) projects, that, for example, make use of Web 2.0 and other various multimedia tools, are considered essential parts of the curriculum; both multimedia and multimodal projects, indeed, have been incorporated in numer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Multiliteracies in World Language Education
• Sereis Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Advancing Multiliteracies in World Language Education
• PART I Designing Multiliteracies Curricula
• PART II Implementing Multiliteracies-Based Projects
• Afterword
• List of Contributors
• Index