Time/Date: Monday, October 20, 2025 (3:30-5:00 pm) 

Speaker: Chantelle Warner, University of Arizona 

Title: Multiliteracy Play: Balancing Designs and Designs in the Second Language Classroom  

Abstract: Over the past two decades, multiliteracies approaches to second language education have drawn attention to the diversity of modes, media, language varieties, and discourses involved in what we often shorthand as language learning. A core concept in these discussions is meaning design—the idea that languages are dynamic, culturally shaped systems of resources for engaging with and making sense of the world. Learners are positioned not only as decoders or interpreters of language, but more importantly, as users—as designers of meaning themselves. Building on these discussions, this talk advocates for an expansion of multiliteracies frameworks in second language education by recognizing that learning a new language and culture involves not only designs but also desires: the affective and aesthetic dimensions through which our engagements with language move us and become meaningful. Practical examples from collegiate modern language classes in the U.S. will demonstrate how a play-based approach to language and culture teaching and learning—grounded in multiliteracies pedagogies—can foster learners’ and teachers’ awareness of designs, while also making space for desires that are more difficult to script or plan for. In addition to building a conceptual map of multiliteracy play, the talk will illustrate how it can be integrated into classroom practice and curricula.

Bio: Chantelle Warner is Professor of German Studies and Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs in the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona, where she long directed both the German language program and Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL). Dr. Warner’s research focuses on affective, experiential, and aesthetic dimensions of language use and learning, foreign language literacy development, pedagogical stylistics, and critical multilingualism studies and she has published and presented widely across these areas. Her recent monograph, Multiliteracy Play: Designs and Desires in the Second Language Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2024), argues for an expansion of models of literacy development and related pedagogies in second language teaching and learning to better integrate not only a wider range practices and modalities, but also different aesthetic and feeling rules that tacitly shape our responses to different language uses. Most recently she has been working on project that investigate the roles of emotion labor and crisis management in the work of language teachers and language program directors.