Multimodalities and Chinese Students’ L2 Practices: Positioning, Agency, and Community - Hardcover

Wang, Min

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1498594565 ISBN 13: 9781498594561

Publisher: Lexington Books, 2020

Synopsis

Multimodalities and Chinese Students’ L2 Practices: Identity, Community, and Literacy explores the complex relations and interactions among multimodality, positioning, and agency in increasingly digitized, multilingual, and multicultural contexts. Min Wang uses interview narratives, WeChat exchanges, and class observations and field notes of three Chinese international students’ lived experiences of English learning to show that these L2 learners recognized and appropriated multiple modes and digital tools for their L2 literacies practices. They used multimodalities to position themselves as L2 users who are confident, able, and competent, but sometimes also struggling and ambivalent. The practice of meaning-making, remaking, designing, and redesigning demonstrated their agency as L2 learners. Positioned as cultural and social beings, these L2 learners presented their self-understandings and self-representations through symbolic and material artifacts, interactions with local and non-local people, and engagement in WeChat discussions and ELI learning. They assumed rights, obligations, and expectations in order to become legitimate community members. In the process their agency was promoted, negotiated, or sometimes limited by micro-social structures and ongoing interactions.

About this title

About the Author

James Paul Gee has been featured in a variety of publications including Redbook, Child, Teacher, USA Today, Education Week, The Chicago Tribune, and more. He was formerly the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is now the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University.  He is a founder of the Center for Games and Impact at ASU which orchestrated a national conversation on games and learning for the White House Office of Science and Technology. Described by The Chronicle of Higher Education as "a serious scholar who is taking a lead in an emerging field," he is the author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1498594565
• ISBN 13: 9781498594561
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 180