Reassessing Film in the Foreign Language Curriculum: A Multiliteracies Approach

never lived up to the original expectations. This failure has been particularly true of film, feature and documentary, as instructors have struggled with students’ comprehension issues, leading to SLA studies on the effectiveness of subtitles, captions, pre-viewing and post-viewing strategies. The ensuing pedagogical approaches rarely went beyond communicative strategies of scene description and regurgitation of plot. For the past few years several scholars (Paesani et al 2016; Kaiser 2018) have advocated for a reexamination of film within a multiliteracies approach, whereby the film is seen as a text employing various semiotic systems to create meaning.
In this presentation I will present clips from several different films and examine the ways that filmic devices and language are used to create meaning. I will consider various tasks that an instructor might employ with the aim of developing students’ linguistic, intercultural, and symbolic competences and their visual literacy. Finally, I will demonstrate the core features of "Lumière", the Berkeley Language Center's database of 19,000+ clips, and the strategies used in Lumière to aid student comprehension.

Presenter's Bio:
Mark Kaiser received his PhD in Slavic Linguistics from the U of Michigan in 1989. He taught Russian at Illinois State University, reaching the rank of Associate Professor, and served as director of the Russian Studies program. He went to Berkeley in 1996 to serve as the Associate Director of the newly formed Berkeley Language Center. At the BLC Kaiser has worked on 150+ curricular projects by graduate students and language lecturers as part of the BLC Fellows program; he has designed new classroom spaces; he oversaw the development of an online computer testing platform, currently in use by Chinese and Japanese for placement. However, most of his time at the BLC has been spent in the development of the Library of Foreign Language Film Clips, renamed Lumière, an online database of film and clips. He occasionally teaches various levels of Russian.