This presentations reports on a case study of the informal L2 language and digital literacy development of an adult fan. The focal participant for this case study, Steevee, is a female fan in her early 30s originally from a small city in eastern Germany who first entered online media fandom six years prior with the goal of developing her English in order to live and work in London. Data analyzed include semi-structured interviews, email correspondence, and analysis of Steevee’s fan-based social media accounts on Tumblr and Twitter. Findings reveal how Steevee’s heavy involvement in the fan practice of spoiling, defined as the discovery and sharing of plot elements (Duffet, 2013), during filming of the television series Sherlock facilitated Steevee’s English and digital literacy development for the purpose of living an working in an English-speaking context. This study, therefore, documents the process through which an adult L2 English user makes use of popular culture, technology, and online media fandom to engage in informal language learning.

1. Shannon Sauro
Malmö University, Sweden
shannon.sauro@mah.se |@shansauro | mah.academia.edu/ShannonSauro | ssauro.info
“I’M GOING TO GET
ONLINE AND I’M
GOING TO TALK TO
PEOPLE AND
LEARN ENGLISH”
THE INFORMAL
LANGUAGE LEARNING OF
A SHERLOCK FAN

2. Extramural English
“…English-related activities
that learners come in contact
with or are engaged in outside
the walls of the English
classroom, generally on a
voluntary basis.”
(Sundqvist & Sylvén, 2014, p. 4)

3. Online Fandom
“the local and international networks of fans that develop around
a particular program, text or other media product and which foster
the sharing of responses to the source material, including the
production of novel fan-generated content.” (Sauro, 2014, p. 239)

4. Fanfiction Research in
Applied Linguistics
• Teen L2 learners’ use of fanfiction
in anime fandoms to transition from
novice writers in English to
successful writers (Black, 2006;
2009)
• Bilingual fanfiction writing practices
of young Finnish fans of American
television shows to index
multilingualism and global
citizenship (Lepännen, et al, 2009)
• Youth writing of self-insert
fanfiction to confront and examine
social issues in their local context
(Lepännen, 2008)

5. Other Fan Practices
• Fan site web design and the
development of textual identity(Lam,
2000).
• Anime consumption and Japanese
learning (Fukunaga, 2006).
• Amateur translations (scanlation) of
Asian manga into Spanish (Valero-
Porras & Cassany, 2015).
• Critiquing and restorying all white
texts by racebending the characters
in fanart (Thomas & Stornaiuolo,
2016).

6. Purpose
To explore the informal
L2 language learning
and digital literacy
development of a
Sherlock fan.

7. Steevee’s Fan History
2009
• Joined Supernatural Fandom
• Joined Twitter; Created a fan FB page
2010
• Joined Torchwood and Doctor Who
fandoms
• Created a fan Tumblr
2012
• Joined Sherlock fandom
• First read fanfiction
• Wrote first fanfiction
2013
• Began reporting on filming of Sherlock
#setlock
• Developed fact-checking skills, brevity
& speed in English for posting.
2015
• Joined The Man from Uncle fandom

8. “As we have noted, motivation
is never simply in the hands of
the motivated individual learner
but is constructed and
constrained through social
relations with others”
(Ushioda, 2008, p. 157)

9. I tried to shift my accent
from American English to
British English. I tried to
learn to write colour with
‘ou’ and so on. And I
started to watch Doctor
Who and Torchwood.
Those were my next two
big fandoms.
(Interview, 14 December 2015)
…it was the opportunity to
completely immerse myself
in the English language. That
was it for me. I was so
stoked. I’m going to get
online and I’m going to talk
to people and learn English.
And I’m going to learn new
words. And I used to sit
there with a notepad next to
Twitter and write down
words I’d never seen before,
look them up, learn them.
(Interview, 14 December 2015)

10. Spoiling
“…the purposeful discovery of crucial developments in the plot of a fictional
story of a film or TV series before the relevant material has been broadcast
or released.”
(Duffett, 2013, p. 168)

11. “The non-native speakers are really the lose canon because
they might understand something incorrectly because of their
own lack of knowledge of the English language or sarcasm or
whatever is being used as a metaphor for example.”
(Interview, 14 December 2015)

12. Due to the massive increase of hits and followers due to setlock, I somehow
became someone who was consulted on various things and I realized that if I
wanted to help/give answers etc, I’d have to make myself understood in the
way I wanted to be – that’s when my answers got longer and more in-depth,
as I wanted to make sure my arse was covered XD
(Email, 7 January 2016)

13. Affordances
“text-making practices are not
determined by what the
resources naturally offer but
are shaped by how people
perceive what various
representational resources
can or cannot do for them”
(Lee, 2007, p. 227)

14. “Many young people today
consider what exists on the
Internet freely available raw
material to be used however
they see fit. Moreover, tools for
copying and modifying this raw
material are simple and
abundant. What is distinctive
about the digital environment is
not borrowing per say … but
rather the sense that borrowing
does not require an
acknowledgement.”
(Chun, Kern & Smith, 2016, p. 69)

15. That was the first thing I
learned on Twitter,
basically. How not to
steal anybody’s tweet
because I got yelled at
for copying and pasting
because that’s what I
knew.
(Interview, 14 December 2015)
I had no idea what
Tumblr was about until
I got yelled at…And
from then on I knew,
you give credit. You
reblog. You can tag
some things. So
somebody took me by
the hand, and I’ve
taken hundreds of
people by the hand
over the years, letting
them into the fandom
on Tumblr, so to speak.
Don’t steal anybody’s
art.
(Interview, 14 December 2015)

16. Twenty-first century
skills include critical
thinking, information
literacy, global
citizenship.
(Suto, 2013)

17. And setlock has taught me in a way to check many things that come up.
Like today, it was the Pope posted his first selfie…Within one minute I
had found out, even before Buzzfeed had found out, I knew that the
picture was not a selfie but a screengrab from an interview he once did.
(Interview, 14 December 2015)

18. I know I have those tools because of fandom. To
think differently. To think critically. Especially to try
to see it from a different point of view. And fandom
has provided me with so many tools regarding my
own everyday life and also accepting the other
lives around me as part of the whole.
(Interview, 14 December 2015)

19. 1. Experience working
with clients from
multiple countries
2. Social media savvy
3. Internet research skills
4. Native writing skills in
both German and
English.
(Job Announcement, 20 June 2016)

20. References
Black, R.W. (2009). Online fan fiction, global identities, and imagination. Research in the Teaching of English, 43, 397-425.
Black, R.W. (2006). Language, culture, and identity in online fanfiction. E-learning, 3, 180–184.
Chun, D., Kern, R., & Smith, B. (2016). Technology use, language teaching, and language learning. The Modern Language Journal, 100
(Supplement 2016), 64-80.
Duffett, M. (2013). Understanding fandom: An introduction to the study of media fan culture. New York/London: Bloomsbury.
Fukunaga, N. (2006). “Those anime students”: Foreign language literacy development through Japanese popular culture. Journal of Adolescent &
Adult Literacy, 50(3), 206-222.
Lam, W. S. E. (2000). Literacy and the design of the self: A case study of a teenager writing on the Internet. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 457-484.
Lee, C., K.-M. (2007). Affordances and text-making practices in online instant messaging. Written Communication, 24(3), 223-249.
Lepännen, S. (2008). Cybergirls in trouble? Fan fiction as a discursive space for interrogating gender and sexuality. In C.R. Caldas-Coulthard and R.
Iedema (Eds.). Identity trouble: Critical discourse and contested identities, (pp. 156-179). Houdsmills, UK: Pallgrave Macmillan.
Lepännen, S., Pitkänen-Huhta, A., Piirainen-Marsch, A., Nikula, T., & Peuronen, S. (2009). Young people’s translocal new media uses: A
multiperspective analysis of language choice and hetero-glossia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14, 1080–1107.
Petersen, L.N. (2014). Sherlock fans talk: Mediatized talk on tumblr. Northern Lights, 12, 87-104.
Sauro, S. (2014). Lessons from the fandom: Task models for technology-enhanced language learning. In M. González-Lloret & L. Ortega (Eds).
Technology-mediated TBLT: Researching technology and tasks, (pp. 239-262). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Sundqvist, P., & Sylvén, L.K., (2014). Language-related computer use: Focus on young L2 English learners in Sweden. ReCALL, 26(1), 3-20.
Suto, I. (2013). 21st Century Skills: Ancient, ubiquitous, enigmatic? Research Matters. A Cambridge Assessment Publication,15, 2-8.
Thomas, E.E., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2016) Restorying the self: Bending toward textual justice. Harvard Educational Review, 86 (3), 313-338. Doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-86.3.313
Ushioda, E. (2008). Language motivation in a reconfigured Europe: Access, identity, autonomy. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development,
27(2), 148-161.
Valero-Porras, M.-J., & Cassany, Y. (2015) Multimodality and language learning in a scanlation community. Procedia - Social and Behavioral
Sciences 212, 9-15.

21. Acknowledgements
Graphics
Fox Estacado of The Art of Fox Estacado: Fine Fan Art and Geekery (artbyfox.storenvy.com). All rights
reserved and used in this presentation with permission.
Photographs of #setlock
Shannon Sauro.
Slides available at http://www.slideshare.net/Shansauro