En Akademisk Kvart: Fanfiction & English Language Learning
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An overview of results from a project that used collaborative role-play fanfiction based on Tolkien's The Hobbit to teach English. From the November 12 Akademiskt Kvart lecture, part of the lunchtime short lecture series sponsored by Malmö University and the Malmö City Library.
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En Akademisk Kvart: Fanfiction & English Language Learning
- 1. Report From Middle Earth Fanfiction and English Language Learning Shannon Sauro Malmö University Shannon.sauro@mah.se @shansauro
- 4. LANGUAGE LEARNING & LANGUAGE PLAY “A rich source of inspiration for the development of … technology-mediated tasks can be found in the language play and language use of online media fandoms…” (Sauro, 2014, p. 242)
- 7. THE QUEST: BLOG BASED ROLE PLAY 1. Story Outline & Map of a Section of Middle Earth 2. Collaborative Story of a Missing Moment from The Hobbit 3. Reflective Paper 4. Oral Presentation
- 8. 11 TALES (49,445 WORDS)
- 9. CAREFUL READING “Usually I just plow through books like these to get a good story, but to suddenly look for “gaps” where we could create another story or to actually put myself in the mind of Bombur gave even more knowledge of the book.”
- 10. “FIRST OF ALL, LET ME START BY SAYING THAT I AM NOT A FAN OF CREATIVE WRITING. I ENJOY READING BUT I ABSOLUTELY LOATHE WRITING.”
- 11. SO HOW WAS THE WRITING? Communicative Competence • Linguistic competence • Sociolinguistic competence What is appropriate in which situation and with which speakers • Discourse competence • Strategic competence (Canale & Swain, 1980)
- 12. HOBBIT-LIKE STYLE "By all the good apricot marmalade I've ever eaten! How insolent!" Bilbo had to take hold of his own collar to keep himself from yelping his thoughts out loud. "Here I am, despite my own dearest wish, on a dangerous route to find that coarse mutt of a dwarf riches, and how am I estimated? This journey is a miserable thing altogether!" – (from Secrets of the Last Homely House)
- 13. VOICING THE AUTHOR “Bombur, it’s time for you to start hauling or you will receive a one way ticket down the waterfall!” Kili yelled. That got Bombur moving faster than ever, except the time they ran from the skin changer, but that comes later in the story. (from The Wooden Bridge)
- 14. ATTENTION TO FORM & STRUCTURE It is lying still, yet it spins around It tries to move but its body is bound All because of the precious it stole Fool us again and they eats it whole. (from The Mirkwood Mysteries)
- 15. TYPES OF WORDS USED
- 17. TYPES OF WORDS IN ACTUAL FANFICTION
- 18. ADVICE FOR THE NEXT ADVENTURE
- 19. LOOK TO FANDOM Draw upon texts with an existing fandom and allow their fanworks to guide the parameters of the assignment
- 20. CONSIDER MULTIMEDIA TEXTS “I normally don’t read books, I mostly prefer to watch movies and this was a fun challenge for me.”
- 21. FIND TECHNOLOGY THAT FITS Consider: – The affordances of the particular tool for narrative texts – What is ubiquitous from your students’ perspective – What technology they need to learn to use
Editor's Notes
- -Thanks for joining me for the next little while. -My name is Shannon Sauro and I’m an applied linguist in the teacher education program at Malmö university. -I do research on ways of using technology and different ways of teaching to help different kinds of students learn languages better. -There are a lot of unusual ways people go about learning a new language, but today I am going to talk about just one of these, fanfiction, and whether fanfiction can be used in a classroom to actually teach English.
- Image Source: drimaues.tumblr.com First, for those who don't know what exactly fanfiction is, it's the name for stories written by fans (people who like things) about the people, characters, books, movies, bands, and sports teams they really like. Sometimes people write fanfiction because they love a story so much they don't want it to end, or because they were disappointed in the ending, or because they wonder what would happen if their favorite character or football player worked in a coffee shop in their home town. Or to put it another way…the story is not over until we say it is. Fanfiction has been explored by fans and researchers in fan studies is a broad term encompassing many different genres and functions.
- There is A LOT of fanfiction that people write in many languages for fun. There has been research which has explored individuals’ use of fanfiction to develop their own langauge skills. We see this in the excellent case studies carried out in the US by Eva Lam, Rebecca Black and a little closer to home by the work of Sirpa Lepannen and her colleagues in Finland. But the question remains whether fanfiction can be used in a classroom to actually teach a language.
- You might be wondering, why use fanfiction to teach? What does that have to do with learning a language? -To answer this we look to an educational framework for language teaching called task-based language teaching in which courses are structured around tasks that reflect language learners’ real world use of the language they’re learning. -Often we think of work task, things you might use language for at your job or school. -But when we look online and when we look at English language use in Sweden, we see that people use language for a lot of things, like reading books, watching movies or television, playing video games or role-play games, and even discussion and writing fanfiction about these things we like. The language of storytelling, in fact, requires a high degree of skill and possibly different kinds of language learning we normally see emphasized in the secondary and university English language classroom. So why not create tasks that help learners develop these skills? The language of storytelling and the language of the text is crucial to fanfiction and provides an interesting test case for fostering a different kind of language learning than we might normaly see in secondary and university level language classrooms
- So the question remains – can fanfiction can be used in actual classroom settings to support English language learning. To answer this, we experimented on a class of students training to be secondary school English teachers and took them on an adventure. With The Hobbit.
- A little about this adventure. The course the fanfiction task was designed for (English Studies and Education: Language, Text and Culture) -Is a 10 week course taken by students in their first term of study in the English teacher education program for those specializing in teaching at the secondary and upper secondary level. It included the following learning goals which inspired our project: 1. Students needed to be able to summarize, analyze, and discuss a literary text 2. Students needed to be able to write a fiction story using a few different creative writing techniques So what exactly did we have our students do
- We began with 55 students who were organized into groups of 3-6. Each students picked a favorite character from The Hobbit, a book they had been reading in class, and worked with their partners to outline a story from a missing moment from The Hobbit. -(for example, what were all the dwarves doing right before they met up at Bilbo's house). -Each student then role played their character and tried to match their character’s way of speaking and behaving and contributed 6 paragraphs to the overall story on on a group blog. -After completing the story, students wrote a reflective paper about what they learned and gave oral presentations. In addition, students also had the option to view the second of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films, The Desolation of Smaug, which premiered in Sweden during the third week of this project.
- Of the 12 groups that began the course, 11 completed stories, producing a total of nearly 50,000 words. Stories included missing moments from throughout the Hobbit, including (An Unexpected Prologue) which explored what each of the Dwarves were doing before they met up at Bilbo’s house before their journey began (Secrets of the Last Homely House) in which Bilbo overhears a conversation between Elrond and Gandalf as well as (The Battle of Five Armies) which explores in detail a major battled at the end of the book from the perspective of several characters who do not survive it, something.
- In order to write like a certain character, there was a lot of careful reading involved. Many students remarked on this and the fact that they had never read a text so carefully before: Here’s what one student had to say…
- But it also helped other students with writing, especially those who had never written fiction before. “First of all, let me start by saying that I am not a fan of creative writing. I enjoy reading but I absolutely loathe writing. With that said, I was pleasantly surprised with this task. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would and I also think it is an excellent way of writing because of the help you can get from your fellow group members. … This type of group work generally improves the story both language wise and storytelling wise.
- So how about the writing. When evaluating language learning, we often focus on aspects of grammar, vocabulary and even pronunciation and focus on accuracy. -To know a language encompasses more than just this, also known as linguistic competence. -Canale and Swain provide a four-part notion of different competences we often look for. This is called communicative competence. -When it comes to story-telling, it makes sense to focus not just on how accurate something is linguistically, but how successful the learners were with using language to tell a story. -For this reason, I at sociolinguistic competence – defined here as what is appropriate language in which situation and with which speaker. -In other words, did these students succeed at using English to writing fiction. Did they use language that was appropriate to the context and function of storytelling in English?
- Yes they did. Looking at both the stories as well as the reflective papers, we saw examples of specific style choices made to capture the voice of their character. Here is one. “I find Bilbo quite a worrying character. He has not yet become the great adventurer that he is in the trilogy. So I tried to find ‘worrying-expressions’ that are typical for Bilbo in The Hobbit.” ‘dear me’, ‘ miserable’ “I tried to imitate his typically English prudency, which is also very hobbit-like” In this highlighted sentence, identified by the student, Bilbo’s English or hobbit-like style and reference to the comforts of food to express frustration is voiced.
- Aside from voicing the character, the students also incorporated literary techniques that matched those that Tolkien used. In other words, they mimicked his storytelling style in some places. Awareness of audience in a children’s story – breaking the fourth wall. This is a literary device Tolkien uses in The Hobbit and mirrored here in this story as a way to give a nod to the reader of what is to come. The voice of the story-teller acknowledging that the reader is experiencing a narrative. Students in their reflective papers and presentations also acknowledged awareness of audience and style after carefully examining Tolkien’s own writing: “When trying to write like Tolkien, we looked to the book and checked what word choices he made. He seemed to use old-fashioned English.”
- The prior examples have focused mainly on vocabulary features to show sociolinguistic competence. But students also paid careful attention to grammar when voicing certain characters, like Gollum who has a fondness for riddles but also grammatically incorrect speech: One student wrote: “I really tried to make Gollum’s language from the movies work together with the features specific to the book. He does speak grammatically incorrect and that was a bit tricky to make work as of making him understood.” And went on to point out one of the advantages of the assignment: “I have not worked in this way before with reading and writing where you tend to go back to your book like a dictionary to highlight special features from your character.”
- But aside from looking at specific textual examples, I was also interested in looking at broader indications of how the students were doing in mastering this type of writing. One area of interest concerns comparing the vocabulary of the texts to similar genres. To look at this, I analyzed the words used in the 11 stories using the online COCA corpus. -The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is the largest freely-available corpus of English, and the only large and balanced corpus of American English. -Entering one of the stories (Secrets of the Last Homely House) into COCA allowed for the generation of a comparison of word lists created against the texts stored in COCA, including fictional texts. -Here the words in the story are grouped into different classes 1-500 are the most frequently occurring words in the corpus These include, as expected many of the function words – prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns and high frequency verbs, nouns and phrases 71% of the words used in this story draw from these top 500 words 501-3000 are the next most frequently occurring 2500 words We see here in green a larger number of verb, nouns and adverbs indicating attitude This represents 12% of the words used in this story <3000 are more rare and specialized words Here in yellow you can see a lot of these are again content words such as nouns specific to the story (hobbit) and other nouns like passages, wisdom, magic, journey This represents 18% of the words in the story In red we have academic words of which there are indeed very few at only 1% Running the other 10 stories through reflected similar profiles. A second way of using COCA to look again at vocabulary is to compare the students stories with actual fanfiction stories within COCA. In other words, how well do these texts reflect the norms Of actual fanfiction writing done ‘not for class’.
- And that’s what I did. Archive of Our Own, is a large free and publicly available fanfiction archive where fans upload, share and comment on their fanfiction stories. I therefore went looking for a sample story that might share similar parameters to those written for the assignment. Specifically, they dealt with the Hobbit and consisted Of a handful of main characters and not original characters, they were a similar length, they remained in the same universe and timeline. They focused on a missing Moment and not on romance or world-building and they were written around the same time as my students’ own stories. Using these search parameters, I selected ‘The Shire – Food, Food, Food’ by fuzzybooks and put that into the COCA. I do see that this is a moderately successful piece of fiction. 15 people left comments. Since its publication in Feburary 2013, -It has been viewed 22151 times. -111 people left kudos indicating they liked the story, and -26 people bookmarked the story so they could come back and read it again later.
- And here’s what I found. 75% of the words used were in the 1-500 range -This is similar to the 71% in the Secrets of the Last Lonely House 10% came from the 501-3000 range -Again, this is similar to the 12% from the students’ story 15% came from > 3000 range -Just slightly lower than the 18% that the students’ story possessed. Again, this is not a carefully matched comparison, and I know nothing about the author of the text. What their first language is, their age, their training in writing and whether they might be a professional writer doing fanfiction on the side for a little fun or a high school student in Canada writing fanfiction to make friends. However, going back to the initial information on the story… So this broad strokes view of word types is another way of evaluating the sociolinguistic competence – appropriacy of word choice for this type of academic text type.
- So I’d like to conclude with a bit of advice that we learned along the way regarding what seems to work and what didn’t. One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor https://d2m2lkhawsaq1u.cloudfront.net/uploads/trial/one-does-not-simply-walk-into-mordor_1394963912.jpg
- First, when identifying source material, Draw upon texts with an existing fandom – Not all texts are as likely to elicit the same degree of creative engagement. Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, which does not seem to generate a lot of fanfiction, may be a harder text to sell. This also allows you to look to existing fanworks for ideas of what is feasible, or perhaps too difficult within the parameters of the story being told. The Hobbit is rich in characters (although some underdeveloped) and lends itself to character-driven assignments such as this one. Because it is a fantasy text, it also lends itself to other types of storytelling that draw upon world building. The relative vibrancy of a specific fandom will often be tied in to current versions or incarnations that are ongoing as can be seen here, where the Sherlock Holmes fandom, a fandom that has existed for well over a hundred years, has seen a huge uptick in fanworks generated as a result of recent versions including the Guy Ritchie films staring RDJ, the BBC Sherlock adaptation set in 21st century London (itself an alternative Universe piece of fanfiction) and the US-based Elementary set in New York city with Lucy Liu as Joan Watson. and this brings me to another recommendation for incorporating fanfiction in the classroom
- Tip 2 – use Multimedia texts. 1. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that not all students come to class with the same background or interest in reading the same kinds of texts. One of the major components of this assignment was awareness of this fact. Multi-media texts (those that include different versions in movie, comic or televised form) give students more to draw upon and may help those who are less used to reading fiction immerse themselves in a project like this. 2. The second hobbit film, the Desolation of Smaug, helped one student imagine his character’s voice and helped him to read the original text more carefully. He writes: “I normally don’t read books, I mostly prefer to watch movies and this was a fun challenge for me. I can see that the movies have made a good portrait (both the acting and the voicing) of Smaug from the book which actually made me interested in reading the section with Smaug once more. It was fun trying to capture the behavings of Smaug, and I really pushed myself into thinking in English and not Swedish while completing this task.”
- Tip 3 – watch your technology. In this project, in nearly half of the presentations and reflective papers, there were comments that alluded to the technology and the degree to which using a blog was either new and exciting or a bit mystifying and frustrating. This was not a digital tool that was as familiar to the students as it was to the researchers. Although students generally expressed interest in learning how to blog, their unfamiliarity with the tool meant that they did not necessarily select the blogging tool that was best for them: -some admitted to selecting the first offered And other groups acknowledged having to find a way to work around the blog format – creating the story on googledocs and then posting it to their blog in the reverse order they wrote it so that it could be read top to bottom.
- So what’s next. Just in time for the third and final Hobbit film, debuting in Sweden on December 10th, we’re beginning the second stage of our adventure next week. In fact, the next stage of our journey actually begins tomorrow when I’ll be meeting with our next cohort of first semester students to introduce them to the idea of fanfiction and begin to investigate whether a project like this can support both language and literary knowledge development. Stay tuned for more.