Project Directors: Margherita Berti and Kayo Shintaku (University of Arizona)
This project creates two related sets of materials that are intended to encourage L2 learners to incorporate elements of their lives outside the classroom into their in-class learning experiences. Materials will assist educators in incorporating social networking and various forms of entertainment (digital games, anime and manga), into beginner through advanced FL classrooms.
Social Networking Sites for Intercultural Competence, Margherita Berti
The primary goal of this project is to provide language educators with pedagogical strategies and practical suggestions for implementing social networking sites (SNSs) and social media for intercultural competence in beginner and intermediate FL courses. SNSs offer a great amount of authentic digital materials and provide opportunities for meaningful and contextualized communication. This modern resource will assist teachers interested in integrating and exploiting SNSs in their own language courses. Three platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, were evaluated for classroom and at-home activities and serve as an example for the analysis and evaluation of SNSs’ benefits and implications for language pedagogy. The outcomes include a language teacher’s guide to SNSs-based pedagogy for intercultural competence, a website offering step-by-step video tutorials for the many uses of the three SNSs named above, and an online webinar, the recording for which is embedded below.
For the complete SSN for Intercultural Competence resources, click here.
Entertainment Media for In-class Learning, Kayo Shintaku
This project assists L2 educators in integrating entertainment media–digital games, animation (anime), and comics (manga)–into foreign language education curriculum. It aims to support L2 educators in providing L2 learners a variety of opportunities to gain cultural and linguistic features that supplement textbook contents. The project also proposes strategies about the incorporation of digital literacies that L2 learners are surrounded by in their everyday lives to encourage them to see the link between inside and outside-of-class learning.
The project goals are: (1) to facilitate more authentic language use in contexts that are relatable and meaningful to L2 learners while simultaneously linking it to textbook contents and materials; (2) to exemplify the use of entertainment media and show its applicability in FL settings by suggesting procedures to select media and sample sessions and activities; (3) to allow L2 educators to utilize available (classroom) technologies to leverage entertainment media in nurturing digital literacies. The project will provide opportunities for L2 educators to explore how to engage L2 learners in a variety of FL literacy practices that can bring more meaningful and more accessible contexts and contents.
For each media type, the resources provide: term definitions, suggested procedures to select entertainment media, sample activities and sessions, annotated bibliographies, and some recommendations for infrastructure and technical issues related to media access.
These resources will be online in later 2020.