Please mark your calendars for a CTRW research colloquium and brown-bag lunch presentation on Tuesday, 6 December from noon to 1.15 in 7191 Helen C. White Hall.
“Moving beyond product, process, or genre: A design orientation to second language writing instruction”
Writing’s role in daily communication has grown in recent years given increases in text messaging and multimodal online composing, and it figures prominently in the 21st century literacies that students should develop. However, theorizing and educational practice related to second language (L2) writing in U.S. collegiate language programs have not kept pace. Whereas innovative writing pedagogies have been widely implemented in other humanities disciplines and L2 contexts outside the U.S., many collegiate language educators continue to overemphasize linguistic accuracy and downplay the sociocultural and cognitive dimensions of writing.
This presentation draws on insights from New Literacy Studies and L2 writing scholarship and posits writing as a multifaceted act of communication that should be developed through explicit instruction from the early stages of language acquisition. Building on the concept of meaning design as the foundational element of communication, I will outline five principles of a Design orientation to teaching L2 writing and will discuss curricular implications of implementing this framework.
Heather Willis Allen is Associate Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a core faculty member in the Second Language Acquisition doctoral program. Her research has appeared in the ADFL Bulletin, Foreign Language Annals, the French Review, L2 Journal, the Modern Language Journal, and Second Language Research and Practice. Her collaborative projects include A Multiliteracies Framework for Collegiate Foreign Language Teaching (2016), Alliages Culturels: La Société Française en Transformation (2013) and Educating the Future Foreign Language Professoriate for the 21st Century (2011). Her current monograph project is tentatively entitled A Design Orientation to Second Language Writing Instruction.