Global simulation as a mediating tool for teaching and learning language and culture as discourse

Abstract

This article reports on a multiliteracies‐based experiential learning curriculum designed for intermediate French built upon the framework of a global simulation pedagogy. Students adopted the roles of fictitious characters living together in an apartment building in Paris and carried out written and spoken tasks through the voice of their character, in dialogic response to an emerging story‐world that integrated both imagined and real‐world current events, and whose discourses were mediated by texts of various genres. Findings from this study demonstrate the way that some students appropriated forms of discourse based on their situated identities and genre conventions of literacy tasks. Implications from these findings point to both the pedagogical possibilities for teaching language, culture, and discourse holistically and the carefulness with which such curricula must be designed if classroom foreign language instruction is to help prepare students for real‐world literacy practices.