Last year, in response to Episode 49: Multiliteracies and CARLA Resources for Teachers with Kate PaesaniProfessor Elyse Petit wrote a guest article for our Midweek News #9.
This interview with Kate Paesani resonates with me. Looking for resources and
developing lesson plans can be time consuming for teachers, and having resources
online where you can pull ideas and get inspired creates this feeling of belonging to
a community of practice. Having online places like CARLA where I can find resources for teaching foreign languages that are reliable, literacy-based, and that follow the ACTFL proficiency guidelines is great. Check out this episode’s show notes for Elyse’s references and more resources on multiliteracies! I am very interested in Kate’s current research on the application of multiliteracies pedagogy. Having used the framework in my own classroom for few years now, I realized that, although powerful, this approach is not easy to grasp at first. As Kate advocates, literacy development projects in foreign language classrooms allow the use of authentic resources, various genres of texts, and different contexts of discourses. The four curricula components (NLG, 1996) or knowledge
processes (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015) mentioned by Kate (experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing and applying) are very useful for teachers in developing lesson plans. However, designing activities in which form and meaning are created is challenging. It
forces instructors to step back from the traditional way of teaching grammar, vocabulary, and culture, which is often in isolation rather than as a whole.