Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Becker once argued that linguistic proficiency is a matter of "an accumulation of prior remembered texts" (1984, p. 435). As literacy has become a key critical term in second language education research in recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in the role of accumulations of texts not only in linguistic development but in the social and professional life worlds of students and teachers. Language learning involves, to paraphrase Richard Kern's (2000) seminal work on literacy in L2 teaching, the exploration of not only new words, but also new worlds. This includes the linguistic and cultural landscapes of physical worlds, and the rich "social, symbolic and material ecologies" (Thorne, 2012, p. 21) of virtual worlds, as well as the imagined worlds mediated through cultural products and practices including literature, film and television, and gaming. We live, to expand Becker's original sentiment, in and through accumulations of texts and literacy-in the sense that our ever-unfolding histories of engaging with and making sense out of these texts are integral to our contemporary social lives and, consequently, to L2 learning and socialization. This special volume on "Living Literacies" is an addendum to an existing body of work in L2 education that has amassed over the past few decades, which makes a collective case that literacy ought to be a central pedagogical objective for language and culture curricula. This has been a particularly predominant discourse in collegiate foreign language teaching, where the calls for a paradigm shift are often directly coupled with critiques of the bifurcated curricular models that have long shaped foreign language departments (e.g., Allen & Paesani, 2010; Kern, 2000, 2003), though interest in L2 literacy over the past couple of decades has also been associated with broader discussions around advanced linguistic development (e.g.,