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)