The Digital World

The seminar goes to work: Towards a theory of collaborative literacy

“…The humanities, and literary narrative in particular, constitute the philosophical ground for its design. Reading matters in an increasingly digital world (Pennington and Waxler, 2018), but reading alone is insufficient. Adult learning theory links directly to the humanities and also to well-developed theories supporting the need for lifelong learning in the 21st century.…”

‘Top-Down’ Pronunciation Teaching Revisited

“…Imitative speaking activities such as those reviewed above involve taking the perspective of another and, in a sense, ‘walking in their shoes’, thus at least momentarily permeating the learner’s ‘language ego boundary’ and making that ego more open to adaptation. I have elsewhere (Pennington and Waxler, 2018: 167–73) reviewed psychological experiments and educational initiatives showing that openness and empathy, and behaviours related to these characteristics, can be enhanced when readers identify with a fictional character; perhaps performing a characterization in a roleplay, reenacting another’s words or overall communicative behaviours, or aiming to reproduce these as closely as possible in one’s own voice and behaviours may likewise encourage or strengthen identification and empathy with the person being portrayed and so impact pronunciation. Whether or not learners become more empathetic through roleplay, imitation, or other acts of ‘transidentitying’, they can certainly learn the features of pronunciation – especially of intonation and voice quality – that convey empathy.…”