FOREIGN LANGUAGES
&
THE LITERARY IN THE EVERYDAY
open lessons for
L2 literacy

Approach

Background and Objectives

In 2015, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) and the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language, and Literacy (CERCLL) launched Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday (FLLITE), a collaborative project that would:

  • help to bridge the Language/Literature divide still prevalent in foreign language programming and textbooks;
  • create an educational community of practice whose members (professors, teachers and graduate students of language, literary and/or cultural studies) generate crowdsourced literacy-based materials in the form of FLLITE lessons: open lessons for copyrighted or open texts (written, oral, visual), and relevant assessment tools;
  • offer a platform for the publication of open educational resources (OER) under Creative Commons licensing for classroom use and professional development;
  • provide a real-world materials development task for students enrolled in FL Teaching Methods courses.

For the past few years, the FLLITE core team consisting of Carl Blyth (U. Texas, Austin), Joanna Luks (Cornell), and Chantelle Warner (U. Arizona) with the help of the editorial board and many submitting authors have worked to meet all of these goals. In this site, you will find resources for teachers and curriculum developers, open educational teaching materials, and ways of participating and joining the FLLITE professional community.

Key Concepts

The literary in the FLLITE project does not refer to literature, per se, but rather to language play in everyday, ordinary texts (e.g. conversations, blogs, YouTube videos, memes, etc.). In the FLLITE approach, students are challenged to play with the multiple layers of meaning that words or structures can convey, such as:

  • Sound Play (e.g. rhyming, homophones, alliteration)
  • Visual Play (e.g. punctuation, formatting, visual symbolism, media intertextuality, cinematography, multimodality)
  • Word Play (e.g. puns, spelling, capitalization, semantics)
  • Grammar Play (e.g. foregrounded grammar, nouns as adjectives, non-standard grammar in poetry)
  • Genre Play (e.g. modern fairy tales, prose poems, narrative essays)
  • Pragmatic Play (e.g. register, politeness, forms of address, functional language)
  • Perspective Play (e.g. point of view, characterization, mood, evaluation, judgment)
  • Narrative Play (e.g. familiar storylines, narrative structures, modes of storytelling)
  • Symbolic Play (e.g. metaphor, metonymy, digression, oppositions, juxtapositions)
  • Culture Play (e.g. practices, values, schemas of products, code-switching, multilingualism)

Lesson Objectives

All FLLITE lessons aim to improve language skills by raising student awareness about:

  • Textual genres;
  • Cultural mindsets;
  • Patterns of language use and language play.