Month: September 2018

Fan Practices for Language and Literacy Development – Invited Colloquium at AAAL 2019

I’m pleased to introduce the researchers who will be presenting in the invited colloquium on Fan Practices for Language and Literacy Development at the conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Atlanta, Georgia (March 9-12, 2019). Individual paper abstracts are available on the AAAL website at the link above.

Colloquium Summary

This colloquium brings together research that explores the language and literacy development of fans engaged in different types of online fan practices. The fan practices explored here include not only the writing of fanfiction (stories that build upon and transform existing characters and universes that others have written about), but also fansubbing (the translation of audio-visual texts such as those found in television shows and digital games), spoiling (the discovery and sharing of plot points from movies and television shows during filming), and restorying (for example, the race-bending, gender-bending/cis-swapping of characters from popular media in fan works such as fanfiction and fanart). Each of the papers presented in this colloquium reflect a wide range of linguistic, digital, literary, and even social transformation that emerges when fans engage with and transform popular media through their fan practices.

Taken together, therefore, this collection of papers explores a variety of practices in the digital wilds that have been undertaken by fans to support language learning and digital literacy development, to critically respond to literary texts, to foster opportunities for identity negotiation and feedback on writing – all of which hold implications for the classroom.

Spoiler Alert! The digital literacy development and online language learning of a Sherlock fan

Shannon Sauro (Malmö University)

 

The ins and outs of fan translation of games

Boris Vazquez-Calvo (University of Southern Denmark, University of Santiago de Compostela)

 

Restorying as myth-making, world-making, and self-making: How fans are reading and writing the self into existence

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (University of Pennsylvania)

 

Looking back and thinking ahead: Charting new directions in online fanfiction research

Jayne C. Lammers (University of Rochester)

Alecia M. Magnifico (University of New Hampshire)

Jen Scott Curwood* (University of Sydney)

  

 

Discussant

Steve L. Thorne (Portland State University/University of Groningen)

 

Critically examining the use of blog-based fanfiction in the advanced language classroom

For anyone curious about what works (or doesn’t) when implementing blog-based fan fiction in the classroom and how it compares to online fan fiction in the wild, the wait is over. Our article critiquing the implementation and features of blog-based #fanfiction in the university classroom is now available in ReCALL. (Those without institutional access, please message me for an access code). #fanstudies

Reference: Sauro, S. & Sundmark, B. (2018). Critically examining the use of blog-based fanfiction in the advanced language classroom. ReCALL, First View: 1–16, doi:10.1017/S0958344018000071

Abstract: This paper critically examines the integration of online fanfiction practices into an advanced university English language classroom. The fanfiction project, The Blogging Hobbit, was carried out as part of a course in the teacher education program at a Swedish university for students who were specializing in teaching English at the secondary school level. Participants were 122 students who completed the course in 2013 and 2014. In both classes, students were organized into groups of three to six to write collaborative blog-based role-play fanfiction of a missing moment from JRR Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Hobbit. The 31 resulting pieces of collaborative fanfiction, the online formats they were published in, the 122 reflective essays produced by the two classes, and interviews with a focal group of participants were used to explore how technology and learners’ experience with this technology may have mediated the resulting stories. In addition, the classroom fanfiction texts were compared with comparable online writing published in the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (Ao3) to identify thematic and stylistic differences. The results showed that students’ lack of familiarity with publishing in blogs often posed a challenge that some groups were able to overcome or exploit to facilitate or enhance the readability of their completed stories. Compared to online fanfiction, the classroom fanfiction was less innovative with respect to focal characters yet more collective in its focus, with stories being told from multiple characters’ perspectives.