Understanding orality through online fanfiction

Abstract

Fanfiction is a work of fantasy in which fans write stories based on original books, movies, TV series, and other cultural and artistic forms of expression. This study looks into fanfiction dedicated to the popular TV series Breaking Bad. In particular, it examines how fans construct the (spoken) dialogues of their (written) stories. The article explores the pedagogic value of using fanfiction in educational contexts, focusing on the analysis, creation, and enactment of stories inspired by TV series and movies that feature a combination of narration and ‘written speech’. The article also offers practical recommendations for classroom and online activities that support the development of skills and understandings related to writing and orality. The effort of representing speech in a written form (i.e., writing dialogues and descriptions of conversations) can help students reflect, with the aid of the teacher, on the distinctiveness and specificity of written and spoken communication. By comparing, contrasting, and critiquing audiovisual and written texts (e.g., the episodes of a TV series and the transcriptions of its dialogues), and by creating their own dialogue-rich stories, students can improve their understanding of the idiosyncrasies of writing and orality across modes, thus advancing their literacy and critical skills as creative producers, not just consumers, of popular culture and media.

Digital Literacies in TESOL: Mapping Out the Terrain

“…Teachers can weave together diverse digital literacies through a bridging activities framework (Thorne & Reinhardt, 2008) where learners analyze digital texts from their own everyday use to gain an awareness of the linguistic and multimodal features of these texts. Structured participation also occurs when teachers engage their students with out‐of‐class practices like fan fiction writing (Marone & Neely, 2017), Wikipedia writing (King, 2015), or online news commenting (Hannah & de Nooy, 2003). Digital multimodal composing projects (Darvin, 2020; Darvin & Norton, 2014; Hafner, 2014; Hafner & Miller, 2011, 2019; Jiang, 2017) involve the production of genres like web pages, brochures, digital stories, or video documentaries, often drawing on process‐oriented approaches to genre teaching (Hafner & Miller, 2019) and assessment (Hafner & Ho, 2020).…”

Six Steps of Hermeneutical Process at H.-G. Gadamer

“…Partners arrive rather within dialogue sensed in fair way under truth work of art that unites in a new community (Dumitru, Budică & Motoi, 2016, p. 36). Understanding is not a simply self-throw into the game and a impose of an own point of view, but a metamorphosis to the common element in which we do not remain what we were (Teodorescu, Calin & Busu, 2016;Marone & Neely, 2017).…”