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Leveraging Authentic Texts in the LCTL Classroom via Genre Pedagogies

The Southern Language Teaching Conference (SCOLT) 2023 was held in Mobile, Alabama, and that is where MAFLT student Betty Brown and Dr. Bruna Sommer-Farias presented a project on how to leverage authentic texts following a genre-based approach. This project was designed for the course FLT 841 Literacy in a Foreign Language taught by Dr. Bruna Sommer-Farias, and implemented by Betty Brown in her novice-level Japanese language class. Upon lots of discussion and reflection with her students, Betty was able to notice how her learners were able to read manga and interpret key language and rhetorical features, e.g., visual cues, format, onomatopoeias, and grammatical structures with the help of genre analysis tasks.

Bruna and Betty discussed the potential of genre analysis to scaffold authentic texts with special attention to stories, giving examples of how to apply principles of genre pedagogy principles to other languages, including in the novice levels, and to other genres.

Some of the presentation goals were:

• Provide teachers with a framework for genre analysis to teach reading and writing skills
• Introduce strategies to scaffold stories for novice learners
• Discuss how to select culturally relevant authentic texts for novice learners, but not only!
• Examine a genre-based Manga unit and student feedback to reflect on genre knowledge development in any language

Click here to access Betty’s materials for her novice-level Japanese genre-based unit!