In recent years, literacy has emerged as a key critical term in foreign language (FL) teaching and learning. This essay reflects on the history of literacy and on current developments, in particular those related to the development of multiliteracies paradigms. The article concludes with a discussion of emergent topics related to literacy and language teaching and suggests ways in which research in these domains is posing new questions for the field of FL education.
This article critically examines current discourses of internationalizing higher education both inside and outside the humanities and considers whether some contemporary practices and positions taken on by departments of languages, literatures and cultures might actually undermine public perspectives on language study by encouraging conceptually reductive views of language. Three common myths about language study that commonly surface in discussions of internationalization are then identified and analyzed, with the intention of exposing the discursive traps that scholars of languages and literatures often set for themselves and finding new ways of explaining our potential role in institutional efforts to internationalize curricula.
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