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

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 novelThe 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.

Review of Studies on Technology-Enhanced Language Learning and Teaching

“…Scholars suggested the following tools to enhance collaborative writing: wiki [70][71][72][73], Google Docs [74][75][76], blogs [77][78][79] and web-based word processing [80]. These tools are very popular and are used to practice writing and speaking skills [77,81,82]. Language learners can log on to collaborative writing tools to edit the same text, and the system will record the trace of each user.…”

Rewilding Language Education: Emergent Assemblages and Entangled Actions

“…In essence, rewilding language education is a renewed call for increasing the ecological alignment of domesticated instructional spaces vis-à-vis the heterogeneity, complexity, and unpredictability of interaction in the wild (the latter defined here as extramural contexts). While not explicitly termed 'rewilding,' establishing linkages between instructed language learning settings and external communities and material environments to structure pedagogical tasks and student-initiated exploration has a substantial history, especially in digital contexts such as online gaming (Reinhardt, 2019;Thorne, 2008Thorne, , 2012, in fandom participation and fan fiction authoring (Sauro & Sundmark, 2019;Sauro & Thorne, 2021), in social media and online communities (Lamy & Zourou, 2013;Thorne & Reinhardt, 2008), as well as in routine service encounters (Piirainen-Marsh & Lilja, 2019) and in the integration of world languages into academic and professional contexts (Thorne, 2013a) and community-based service learning (Dubreil & Thorne, 2017). In our research on mobile AR, the application of rewilding to instructed language learning settings is intended to introduce structured unpredictability to the language learning and use experience by having participants, in teams of three, engage in intentionally underspecified tasks that involve spatial navigation and route finding, collaborative problem solving, and discovering and learning about sustainable technologies on and around an urban university campus.…”

Reframing Technology's Role in Language Teaching: A Retrospective Report

“…In today's CALL, Otto (2017) acknowledged that “technology has advanced from its ancillary role in the curriculum to become a core source of content and a conduit for authentic language learning experiences” (p. 21). This decade has brought innovation in microblogging (see Blattner, Dalola, & Lomicka, 2015; Blattner, Dalola, & Lomicka, 2016; Hattem & Lomicka, 2016; Lomicka, 2017; Lord & Lomicka, 2012a; 2012b), SNSs (Blattner & Lomicka, 2013; Lomicka & Lord, 2016), fandom (Sauro, 2017; Sauro & Sundmark, 2019), gaming (Reinhardt & Sykes, 2012; Sykes, 2013, 2018; Sykes & Holden, 2011; Thorne & Hellermann, 2017), and augmented and virtual reality technologies (Godwin-Jones, 2016; Sykes, Brim, & Kaiser, 2016). This shift of technology as a core source of content (rather than ancillary material) has allowed researchers and practitioners to explore more complex areas, syntheses, and meta-analyses (e.g., Lin, Huang, & Liou, 2013; Plonsky & Ziegler, 2016; Sauro, 2011), while the rapidity of change and growth in technology has kept the field moving forward both in and out of the classroom.…”

“…This shift of technology as a core source of content (rather than ancillary material) has allowed researchers and practitioners to explore more complex areas, syntheses, and meta-analyses (e.g., Lin, Huang, & Liou, 2013; Plonsky & Ziegler, 2016; Sauro, 2011), while the rapidity of change and growth in technology has kept the field moving forward both in and out of the classroom. As this decade is rapidly coming to a close, scholars have pointed out that issues still remain, such as how to discern communicative and social consequences from using one form of technology over another (Chun, Kern, & Smith, 2016) and understanding how the continuity between learning in and out of the classroom may facilitate teaching with CALL by “minimizing the amount of time teachers and learners must spend learning how to use the technology” (Sauro & Sundmark, 2019, pp. 2–3).…”