Rémi van Compernolle's talk is part of the CLA-CLS Language Research Symposium, an all-day event.

Description

In this talk, van Compernolle reports on a pedagogical intervention that aimed to develop second language (L2) affective repertoires in students enrolled in an advanced U.S. university-level French course. An affective repertoire is the assemblage of linguistic, paralinguistic, and embodied resources speakers have at their disposal for indexing dimensions of their emotional states and social-relational identities during communication. Drawing on Silverstein’s (2003) theory of orders of indexicality, Eckert’s (2008) third-wave variationist sociolinguistics theory, concept-based pragmatics instruction (van Compernolle, 2014), and scholarship on L2 conversation analysis and interactional competence (Hall, 2019), I focus on the ways in which L2 users can choose from among the resources available in their affective repertoires in order to create the social-relational-emotional meanings they wish to create. In this study, a pedagogical enrichment program was designed around a series of film analysis and film creation tasks that culminated in the production of court métrages ‘short films’ as a means of explicitly teaching affective resources in French and engaging students in communicative practice over a fourteen-week academic term. The data include student metacommunicative (van Compernolle, 2019) analyses of French film scenes, draft scripts and filmed performances of student-produced scenes and courts métrages, and metacognitive reflections. The analysis therefore traces the development of students’ knowledge and understanding of French affective resources, including sociolinguistic variation (e.g., presence vs. absence of ne in negation, lexical choices, phonology), aspects speech delivery (e.g., intonation, stress, precision timing), and embodiment (e.g., facial expressions, gestures), as well as their ability to use their developing affective repertoires in communication. To conclude, van Compernolle synthesizes the findings in relation to the importance of developing affective repertoires as part of the broader goal of developing learners’ pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and interactional competencies so that they can become effective communicators in a new sociocultural context.

Biography

Rémi (Adam) van Compernolle (Professor of Applied Linguistics, Carnegie Mellon University) will deliver a talk as part of a joint event with the Center for Language Sciences featuring Elsi Kaiser.

His work focuses on the intersections between cognition, affect and identity in second/foreign/additional language development. Drawing on Vygotskian cultural-historical psychology, his work examines how opportunities for development are co-constructed between people (e.g., teachers and students) and how cultural artifacts (e.g., linguistic forms, semantic and pragmatic concepts) are internalized and, in turn, mediate cognition, affect and identity performance. Most of his work in carried out under formal educational conditions, including classroom discourse and interaction, concept-based instruction and dynamic assessment.

This event is co-sponsored by Penn State University Libraries. See a curated list of publications by all 2026-27 CLA visiting speakers.