AbstractRecent developments in multiliteracies scholarship and pedagogies have highlighted
the situated nature of language use and the diversity of ways that meanings
are expressed, calling attention to creative, agentive processes of designing
meanings using linguistic and semiotic resources for particular communication
purposes within discourse communities. One way in which foreign language teaching can engage students in second language/culture discourse communities
and social worlds is through a Global Simulation (GS) pedagogy. A GS consists in
the creation of a fictitious, socioculturally realistic lifeworld where learners take
on specific roles and interact within a particular community as they work collaboratively
to advance a storyline or complete a project. By adopting a character,
students become social actors who engage with cultural practices as they appropriate
language and other symbolic resources in order to communicate particular
meanings across different discourse contexts. We present a GS curriculum developed
in fourth-semester French based on the Immeuble model (Debyser, 1980)
and carried out through a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996).
We describe the overarching organization of curricular content, including tasks
designed for students’ interpretive and productive engagement with texts. We present
one module—immigration—and students’ textual responses and reflections
on this module. Finally, we discuss the experience of designing a GS curriculum
and include considerations for the development of simulations.
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