Learning a foreign language and locality through an animated documentary film

Abstract

This paper describes one 4-week long online language learning module which utilizes the animated documentary film My Favorite War (Burkovska-Jakobsen, 2020) and analyzes four students’ final essays. The learning module was created considering ethnographic views of cultural inferences (Spradley, 2016), the framework of social space (Lefebvre, 1991), multimodal theory (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), and the model of learning activities, or knowledge processes (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). It was developed for a Latvian language course at the University of Washington (Seattle, USA) in 2021. Its goals are to help students learn more about the target language and locals’ place-based experiences, and to promote students’ semiotic consciousness while developing their multiliteracies. However, the assignment’s assessment criteria related to the interaction of semiotic resources and of linguistic and non-linguistic information were not shared in order to find out if students would include these issues in their essays. Analysis of students’ essays show that after the learning module, students were able to comprehend (a) some individual compositional elements from the film; (b) symbolic and functional meanings of differently marked spaces; and (c) the main character’s feelings in various social spaces, internal conflicts, relationship models, and thoughts about family, work, war, historical truth, and independence. The described learning model can inspire educators worldwide to develop similar teaching practices for other less commonly taught languages.