Chantelle Warner

Framing Foreign Language Education in the United States: The Case of German.

The challenge posed to foreign language (FL) education by globalization and by the multilingual multicultural speech communities it has spawned is showcased by the current crisis in the teaching of German at American colleges and universities. It is not clear why American learners of German should be learning German: for business purposes, for general education, for humanistic enrichment, or for cross-cultural communication? The debate currently going on in Germany around the concept of education or Bildung is a lens through which to understand the debates going on in American German departments and the general crisis of FL education in this country. Rather than prepare students to communicate with members of idealized homogeneous monolingual speech communities, we should frame FL education as an education in reflexivity on the indexical, subjective and historical dimensions of discourse at all levels of the curriculum.

Mapping New Classrooms in Literacy-Oriented Foreign Language Teaching and Learning: The Role of the Reading Experience

While multiliteracy frameworks grounded in social semiotics and genre theory have provided language teachers and users with valuable theoretical maps for understanding the linguistic design of texts, the social and affective experience of foreign language reading has received less attention in fields of foreign and second language pedagogy. Especially in the social, institutional context of the classroom, literacy involves an awareness of periodically precarious symbolic terrains. Readers situate themselves and their textual responses vis-a-vis authors, narrators, or characters, and their own predispositions to a text’s subject matter. This chapter draws on examples from in and outside of the classroom in order to raise some of the issues related to experientiality and reading that theories of literacy and language teaching might address.