Neil H. Johnson

Strategic Interaction 2.0: Instructed Intercultural Pragmatics in an EFL Context

The potential of web-based 2.0 technology for teaching and assessing intercultural pragmatics has become an area of focus for language educators (Cohen, 2008; Belz, 2005, 2006). Research has highlighted that second and foreign language learners show significant differences from native speakers in language use, in particular, with the execution and comprehension of certain speech acts (Bardovi-Harlig & Mahan-Taylor, 2003). Without effective instruction, differences in pragmatics are evident in the English of learners regardless of their first language background or language proficiency. In EFL contexts, such as Japan, where learners have limited exposure to native speaker norms, teaching and learning pragmatic competence can be particularly challenging. The authors describe an ongoing curriculum development project in a Japanese university context, where the goal is to design and implement an effective approach to teaching interlanguage pragmatics. Digitally enhanced Strategic Interaction (SI) sequences (Di Pietro, 1987) provide opportunities for learners to engage in realistic interactive situations that are mediated by use of model conversations, an online wiki space, and digital video technologies. The online space provides opportunities for learner reflection, peer assisted feedback, and detailed intervention from the instructor. Data analysis from pre- and post- written discourse completion tasks suggests that learners are able to use language in more context sensitive ways having engaged with the teaching/learning cycle design.

The shape of joy, the colour of fear: multimodal abduction in the foreign language classroom

In this article, we describe a programme of qualitative research and interpretive analysis around an approach to foreign language pedagogy that aimed to develop learners’ symbolic competence through experience with and examination of the of signs in acts of communication. Learners were presented with the problem of visually representing the abstract concepts of envy, excitement, joy and fear as a means of exploring relationships between mode and meaning and how meaning may be transformed as a result of re-presenting ideas in different modal forms. The data set included learners’ visual compositions, observational field notes on in-class interaction and transcribed semi-structured interviews and student presentations on their work, all of which were analysed through the interpretive lens of Peircean semiotics, specifically the notion of abduction. Findings suggest that facilitating learners’ creative engagement in shifting meaning across representational boundaries of mode can serve to stimulate socio-cognitive processes of abduction, and thereby heighten students’ awareness of and connection to unique linguistic resources afforded by the target language.

Editors’ introduction: multimodality, creativity and language and literacy education

Creativity and creators themselves have ever been heralded as the pride and hope of us all, daedalean deliverers of the masses from doldrums, dysfunction, disease, and all manner of other ills. However, the celebrated creator, for her mysterious “gifts”, has likewise been popularly regarded as an inscrutable other, a possessor of alchemistic powers that the rest of us cannot have, but whose benefits we nonetheless need. This is the pervasive myth of the creative genius, from which everyday assumptions about the extraordinary capacity for creativity derive. “Who is the artist?” we are given to ask, and “What is art?” The philosophical confusion and frustration that such questions may provoke, as Nelson Goodman (1978, p. 57) explains, are unnecessary, though, insofar as these are, actually, the wrong questions to pose when investigating the nature of creativity. Instead of “What is art?”, Goodman writes, we would more usefully enquire, “When is art?” Underpinning this themed issue of Pedagogies, entitled “Multimodality, creativity and language and literacy education”, is the supposition that art, as a blanket term for all realizations of human creativity, is an unexceptional, in fact requisite, component of living, communicating and learning. Creativity, on this view, is not a special quality possessed by artists and designers, but rather a productive event, a pregnant moment. Art, we suggest, comes about, when it does, in and through socially situated, integrative, transformative processes of meaning making, which are potentially available to all. Even more to the particular point of this special issue, and to which we believe the included articles attest, learning itself is a necessarily creative, artistic act, which also comes about, when it does, through inherently social, integrative and transformative processes of meaning making. And learning to communicate, which is our special concern here, needs a nuanced understanding and practical experience and awareness of the multimodal dimensions of real creative expression, i.e. of how diverse modes of representation and communication (written texts, spoken language, gesture, still and moving images, music, etc.) may be integrated in everyday interactions, texts and communicative events and, crucially, to what actual transformative, creative effects. Of course, the vital interconnection of communicative and creative capacities has long been recognized and theorized. In Jakobsen’s (1960) description of the main communicative functions of language, for a prominent example, the poetic and phatic functions – comprising two of six main functions – each account for how creative, playful aspects of language in use are key contributors to successful interaction and communication. For his part too, Vygotsky (1978, 2004) positions imagination and semiotic innovation at the