New Perspectives on Material Mediation in Language Teaching and Learning

This book will focus on new perspectives on the role of material mediation in approaches to language teaching and learning. Offering a diversity of language teaching contexts and learner populations, this book will address the impact of materials on ecological resources of the classroom, the ways materials mediate human action in the classroom, and the materials’ roles in the co-construction of classroom discourse. We invite scholars to submit proposals for original chapters that contribute to the nascent field of research on materials in the language classroom.  

 

Organized by the theoretical frameworks and perspectives of sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991), classroom ecology (van Lier, 1996, 2004), and mediated or multimodal discourse analysis (e.g., Norris, 2004; Scollon, 1998), chapters of this volume explore the ways in which teachers and learners are impacted by the affordances and constraints of the materials while at the same time they bring their own (evolving) resources, identities, beliefs, and expertise to modify and adapt the materials to better suit their local context(s) in the language teaching and learning environments. Contributing authors are asked to frame the scope of their chapters within the parameters of the following guiding research questions:

• How do materials serve as artifacts that mediate human action?
• How do materials serve as semiotic resources in the ecology of the classroom?
• How do materials influence and mediate interaction with the course curriculum and/or the classroom discourse?
• How do materials and their embedded activities teach, help, and/or facilitate language development or afford learning opportunities in the language classroom?
  
  

 

For more information about the book and how to submit, please see the attached PDF call for proposals and visit our site: https://z.umn.edu/material-mediation