This Ecolinguistics seminar covers a broad range of work collectively called ecolinguistics or ecological linguistics. The emerging field mainly concerns transformation of linguistics from its form-focused symbolic and cognitive ecology to a unified conceptualization of ecology of language (Steffensen and Fill, 2014). Enroad from symbolic, natural (local), sociocultural and cognitive ecologies of language, we will read diverse literature ranging from recently emerging ecolinguistics, such as Arron Stibbe’s Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by (2020), which is sociolinguistics in nature, to classical readings covering second language learning and development, such as van Lier’s book on the ecology and semiotics of language learning (van Lier, 2004). The former studies language use and its impact on the environment. The latter concerns the dynamic relationship between learning and instruction impacted by social, physical and cultural affordances. In the previous seminar on a similar topic, we covered mainly the cognitive and sociocultural ecologies based on Leo van Lier's work and selected relevant readings, as co-determined by students interests and the course goals. Nowadays, Ecolinguistics is reclaimed by scholars who have identified themselves in systemic functional linguistics, social semiotics, and distributed language perspectives. Main methods of investigation are critical discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, cognitive ethnography, and cognitive event analysis, to name a few. In this updated seminar, we will explore the central notion that cuts across these four ecologies: What implications the unified ecolinguistics have on “language learners”, language learning, and the design and development of materials and instruction for learning in classrooms, in digital spaces, and in the wild.
Topics regarding both epistemological and ontological orientations will be organized into the following modules, both rhetorically and in actual practices and investigations:
· Learners: Are they truly individual beings cognizing or processing learning only in the brain, or are they only social beings who learn through socialization and interaction? And/or are they ecological and dialogical beings who appropriate biological substrate, sociocultural values, and semiotic resources for sense making?
· Environments/contexts: All research paradigms and pedagogical treatments consider the relationship between the learner and environments. Are environments considered as containers that function in the background? Are learners and environments reciprocally co-emergent, co-defining, co-constitutive? How are learners and environments connected? What are the roles of teacher, technology, community and personal biography in language development?
· Unit of analysis: Unit of analysis is the major entity that defines the ontological nature of your research and ultimately determines the values of finding in pedagogical practices and phenomenological discoveries. We will consider and compare a wide array of approaches on units of analysis from different research paradigms, such as individuals, groups, tasks, t-units, turns, agent-environment coupling, communicative projects, etc.
· Methods and Analytical tools: technological prevalence and advancement pushes the envelope of human limitations on data management, such as data collection, analysis and report. We will examine readily available tools that can advance conducting research from ecological and sociocultural approaches.
· Pedagogical Implications: Synthesizing the first 4 topics, this module explores what an ecological learning space looks like. This includes such topics as action-based learning, project/problem/place-based learning, pedagogy as multimodal design, and student-teacher relationships that bridge teacher-centered and learner-centered dichotomies.
· Ethical Considerations: The recent re-emergence of Ecolinguistics brings new dimensions to this seminar. How does the focus of this course help us become effective, empathic and ethical teachers, educators and researchers.
Steffensen, S. V., & Fill, A. (2014). Ecolinguistics: The state of the art and future horizons. Language Sciences, 41, 6–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2013.08.003
Stibbe, A. (2020). Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By(2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367855512
van Lier, L. (2004). The ecology and semiotics of language learning: A sociocultural perspective. Kluwer Academic Publishers.