AbstractIntegrating digital social media in foreign language curricula expands the
space of the relatively stable world of the classroom to include more dynamic and complex social worlds. One of the struggles for scholars and practitioners
of instructed foreign language environments is how to merge this complexity
with the classroom, which is saturated with its own frames of reference and
typical ways of communicating. This chapter looks at two instructional units
implementing digital communications in a fifth-semester, intensive German
course with a curriculum inspired by multiliteracies and genre-based curricular
models (e.g., Byrnes & Sprang, 2004; Maxim, 2008). In both cases,
sociable digital media—digital games and online discussion forums—were
perceived by the instructors and the LPD as an opportunity to overcome the
two-dimensionality
of text-centric pedagogies (see Lotherington & Ronda,
2014). The focus of the analysis is two case studies—one student from each
unit—one positioned as a “struggling” student and the other positioned as a
“good” student at the start of the engagement with digital media. Through
an analysis of the symbolic struggles that students face as they positioned
themselves within the layered social spaces afforded by the integration of digital
media into other classroom practices, the authors make a case that digital
social pedagogies can enable students to imagine alternative positions for
themselves beyond the typical participation frameworks of the classroom—
even when their actions do not necessarily resemble the learning trajectories
envisioned by LPDs.
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