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

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)

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)

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)

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).

Purpose

To explore the informal

L2 language learning

and digital literacy

development of a

Sherlock fan.

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

“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)

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)

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)

“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)

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)

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)

“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)

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)

Twenty-first century

skills include critical

thinking, information

literacy, global

citizenship. (Suto, 2013)

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)

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)

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)

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.

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