October Newsletter

As a scholar of digital literacies and language diversity, I have been observing the impact of digital, networked, and handheld technologies in Alaskans’ lives. Although historical legacies of English have created extensive language shift and loss (Krauss, 1980), digital and online advances have opened new opportunities for language reclamation. Alaska Native communities, foundations, educators, and linguists have started to tap into the potential of such technologies for supporting access to Indigenous language resources.

Here, I describe some of the ways that technologies have been used to support Alaska Native language reclamation. Although a wide range of technologies are currently being used, I focus on video games, Facebook groups, and smartphone apps. I also discuss how technologies can function within larger sociomaterial networks to support language learning. Although my examples are from Alaska, they are relevant to ...

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I didn’t go back very far in the JoLLE archives to find Multimodal Play and Adolescents: Notes on Noticing Laughterby Dr. Dr. Lalitha Vasudevan, an associate professor at Teachers College published in 2015. I settled on this article quickly because I was drawn in by the title. Play and laughter are often things I think of in early childhood or elementary settings, but not as often with adolescent students. As an English educator, I was excited by the possibilities this article presented and thrilled when the manuscript began with laughter of young people collaborating in community centers.

Vasudevan carefully crafts an argument asserting that in spite of the restrictions, scrutiny, and violence that affects young people, teachers and researchers attend to the lives and practices of young people from a stance that appreciates their agency. In this article, she studies the multimodal play that engages secondary students in literacy spaces within and outside schools. The phrase “multimodal play,” according to Vasudevan, ...

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Yixuan Wang is a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia, in the Department of Language and Literacy education with a focus in TESOL and World Language Education, and is currently the Academic Book Review Editor for the Journal of Language and Literacy Education (JoLLE). Her research interests include art-based research, poetic inquiry in TESOL, Chinese-English bilingual education, translanguaging, and teaching Chinese to heritage learners. Before her doctoral program, she received her ME.d. in TESOL and World Language Education from the same department and B.A. in English Language and Literature from Yunnan University (China). Her poem “Harassment” was published on Write Bitch Write. She enjoys making handcrafts, cooking, and going to cultural events.

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