FROM CLILiG TO DIGITAL TOOLS: DEVELOPING READING STRATEGIES AND COLLABORATIVE SKILLS FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

From CLILiG to Digital Tools: Developing Reading Strategies and Collaborative Skills for University Students. The article sets out to investigate how language awareness strategies found in the didactics of CLILiG (Content and Language Integrated Learning in German) can support, develop and train reading strategies and collaborative skills for university students. As a didactic concept, CLILiG is, on the one hand, the direct result of language policies. On the other hand, it is a natural response to the multilingual learner of today. The first part of the article focuses on CLILiG, its variants, main features (micro- and macro-scaffolding) and how digital tools for learning can be integrated in class, in order to make use of both language and specific content. The second part discusses two didactic examples designed for students studying in German Institutional Communication in the European Union at the Faculty of European Studies, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The article offers a look into digital tools like Coggle and Padlet and how they can be used in class to train reading strategies and collaborative skills with university students. Students’ interaction with challenging texts in a foreign language and digital tools supporting a learning outcome can improve reading skills and allow students to find creative ways of understanding specialized content, especially because of the features digital apps like Coggle and Padlet have to offer. REZUMAT. De la CLILiG la aplicații digitale: Strategii de citire și învățare colaborativă pentru studenți. Articolul explorează cum principiile de conștiență lingvistică (language awareness) regăsite în didactica CLILiG (Content and Language Integrated Learning in German) susțin, dezvoltă și exersează strategiile de citire și colaborare ale studenților. Ca termen, CLILiG este pe de-o parte rezultatul politicilor lingvistice din spațiul german, pe de alta este un răspuns firesc la multilingvism. Prima parte a articolul prezintă abordarea CLILiG, principalele caracteristici ale acesteia (micro și macro-secvenţiere) și felul în care aplicațiile digitale la clasă pot fi utilizate în a exersa atât limba străină, cât și conținutul specific al materiei. Partea a doua conține două exemple didactice concepute pentru studenții înscriși la cursul de Comunicare instituțională în Uniunea Europeană (în limba germană) din oferta Facultății de Studii Europene, Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca. Articolul prezintă aplicațiile la clasă a două instrumente digitale, Coggle și Padlet si felul în care acestea exersează strategiile de lectură a textelor specializate, imbunătățind și colaborarea între studenții participanți la curs și seminar. Exemplele arată cum o lectură planificată (determinată de scopul didactic final) a textelor de specialitate permite înțelegerea acestora și cu ajutorul aplicațiilor digitale precum Coggle sau Padlet. Cuvinte-cheie: CLILiG, aplicații digitale, strategii de lectură, colaborare, macro- și micro-secvenţiere, strategii de conștiență lingvistică

INTRODUCTION

In the context of capitalist globalisation and time-space compression (as defined by David Harvey), several socio-spatial theorists have analysed the relationship between the local and the global, as well as how certain regional representations are the product of cultural interferences and hybridisations. From this point of view, our special issue, Uneven Worlds. Beyond the Canons of Cultural Representations, investigates the role played by regional and (semi-)peripheral cultures within world-systems and geographies of uneven development, and explores how they resist the false homogenisation implied by globalisation. Whether or not we are drawn to global fictions that have emerged from postcolonial literary studies and have employed tropes such as “hybridity, diaspora, transculturation, subaltern, hegemony, deterritorialisation, rhizome, mestizo, Eurocentrism and othering” (O’Brien and Szeman 2001, 605), in relation to world literature or to the “one, and unequal” world-literary system (Moretti 2004, WReC), a certain reminiscence of the Iron Curtain, an impossible translation, and a lack of porosity characterise the circulation of peripheral literatures towards the centre. While writers such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Shehan Karunatilaka and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr are recuperated in the central circuit of the Nobel, Booker and Goncourt prizes, but still living and producing in the centre, we chose to explore the mechanisms of resistance, the impossibility of translation and the subversive strategies of “cultural management” that export various models of the periphery

INTRODUCTION

In the context of capitalist globalisation and time-space compression (as defined by David Harvey), several socio-spatial theorists have analysed the relationship between the local and the global, as well as how certain regional representations are the product of cultural interferences and hybridisations. From this point of view, our special issue, Uneven Worlds. Beyond the Canons of Cultural Representations, investigates the role played by regional and (semi-)peripheral cultures within world-systems and geographies of uneven development, and explores how they resist the false homogenisation implied by globalisation. Whether or not we are drawn to global fictions that have emerged from postcolonial literary studies and have employed tropes such as “hybridity, diaspora, transculturation, subaltern, hegemony, deterritorialisation, rhizome, mestizo, Eurocentrism and othering” (O’Brien and Szeman 2001, 605), in relation to world literature or to the “one, and unequal” world-literary system (Moretti 2004, WReC), a certain reminiscence of the Iron Curtain, an impossible translation, and a lack of porosity characterise the circulation of peripheral literatures towards the centre. While writers such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Shehan Karunatilaka and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr are recuperated in the central circuit of the Nobel, Booker and Goncourt prizes, but still living and producing in the centre, we chose to explore the mechanisms of resistance, the impossibility of translation and the subversive strategies of “cultural management” that export various models of the periphery

Transgressive Spaces in Contemporary Romanian Poetry: A Geocritical Approach

Transgressivity is a major geocritical principle that is fundamental for the morphology of global spaces. Following this theoretical frame, my paper will map out the images and states of transgressivity that arise in contemporary Romanian poetry. How does poetry create transgressive spaces in the context of a post-communist society? Which are the poetic cartographies involved in the process of cognitive, affective and heterotopic mapping of Romanian postCommunism? Finally, how does poetry become a territory of freedom that subverts a given socio-political geography? These are the starting points of my geocritical approach on transgressivity which can be characteristic to the “chronotopography” of post-communist spaces and their poetic representations.</jats:p

(Russian) Writer-Bloggers: Digital Perfection and the Aesthetics of Imperfection

This article explores readings of (micro)blogging services as outlets for playful, "imperfect" language. Adopting a transcultural approach, it examines a blog category that has attracted scarce academic attention to date: the creative worker's blog. Through a qualitative analysis of metalinguistic statements by 14 Russian writer-bloggers, the author tests 2 interdependent hypotheses: (H1) through metalinguistic statements and pragmatic strategies, writers present language play and "imperfect" language as prototypical for new media; and (H2) If H1 is correct, the writer-blogger's preference for "imperfect" language caters into a broader cultural-philosophical anxiety - one of foregrounding imperfection as an aesthetic counterresponse to digital perfection