“Marvel at the Complexity” of Human Behavior and Language with Amanda Brown

In this Q&A, Brown discusses the book’s origins, key takeaways and the collaborative process behind its development.

1. First, describe what your book is about.

This 20-chapter volume, co-edited with Søren Wind Eskildsen from the University of Southern Denmark, examines second and foreign language teaching, learning, and use through the lens of multimodality from different knowledge traditions. The chapters represent contributions from 34 researchers, ranging from qualitative studies about the effects of flexible seating in K-12 language classrooms in France to quantitative investigations of the effects of audio-visual input containing hand gestures to illustrate pronunciation on asynchronous online language learning in Australia. Overall, the volume showcases the rich diversity of work in the field – diversity in research questions, contexts, and methodologies.

2. Did any personal moments or experiences guide your interest or passion for this work? What sparked your idea for this book?

The book is one product of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée / International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) Research Network (REN) on Gesture, Multimodality and Second Language. This network currently comprises researchers from 15 countries across six continents. Members contributed their ongoing work and the thematic organization of the book emerged organically from those contributions.

3. What do you want people to take away from it?

I think the book is important as it highlights the incredible richness of work within just one tiny part of the humanities. Applied linguistics is a sub-discipline of linguistics: a focus on second language teaching, learning, and use is a sub-domain. However, within this sub-domain, an examination of multimodality reveals a complex web of speech and gesture, sign and symbol, text and body position, all interrelated facets of communication in second and foreign languages as well as in our native languages.

At a micro level, I want readers to marvel at the complexity of human behavior in general and of this phenomenon in particular; that teaching, learning, and using a second language involves so many more semiotic resources than the primary channels of speech, sign, and text, for example, the way we position our bodies, move our hands and even heads and eyebrows in language comprehension and production, often enacted without conscious thought. At a macro level, I would also like readers to observe and appreciate the diversity and common ground inherent in the book: the research foci, contexts, and methods, while incredibly varied, are all leveraged towards the common goal of shedding light on the processes of second language teaching, learning and use.

4. What did your process of research and writing look like?

With the co-editors based in different countries, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, the majority of communication between Søren and me was online, through many emails and zoom calls. These were so numerous and at such unusual times given our time zone differences that Søren became a frequent zoom visitor at my family breakfast table and my youngest daughter often practiced saying his name with one syllable as it is pronounced in Denmark and like a Viking! The process of identifying the theme and organization of the book was somewhat unusual, emerging organically from a qualitative analysis that Søren and I performed of chapter proposals submitted by network members. After Routledge’s approval of our book proposal, we moved to solicitation of full chapters. Given the close-knit nature of our AILA REN community, it was important for us as co-editors to look outside the network to implement a double-blind peer review process so as to ensure rigor and quality in chapter submissions, including each of our own, which the other handled to maintain reviewer confidentiality. Our introduction and concluding synthesis chapters were co-written at the end [of the collaborative process] and were the product of many long conversations, a research meeting in Denmark, and individual and collaborative drafts.

5. Who influenced your understanding of the material you produced (authors, mentors, scholars, etc.)?

Søren and I are indebted to Gale Stam, a cofounder of the AILA REN, whose vision and leadership has sustained an incredible network of researchers and who invited us to produce the volume. I am grateful to all the chapter contributors, whose valuable work constitutes the core content, and to the reviewers, who so thoughtfully read each contribution and provided critical comments that enhanced final versions. Mostly, I am indebted to Søren.

He and I are polar opposites. He is a qualitative researcher, working with naturalistic data in classrooms and beyond in Denmark, examining in incredible detail moment to moment interactions from a conversation analytic perspective. I am an experimentalist, working with data, often quantitative, generated in lab settings in the USA, Japan and China, from a psycholinguistic perspective. We spoke different languages, literally and epistemologically. Yet we connected over our common interests and goals, learned so much from each other, and reflected on our own research questions, data, and analyses in new ways. We also developed deep personal bonds over the work and over major events in each other’s lives during the close to three years in which the book was developed and published.

6. How did creating this work affect the way you see things?

Co-creating this diverse volume, with someone as different from me as Søren is, literally forced me to look up and around, to see and appreciate the ecosystem within which I exist. I knew it was there all along, but rarely had the time, opportunity, or immediate need to reach out. Co-writing our concluding chapter, which attempted to synthesize the volume’s research chapters, drawing out commonalities and differences, revealed gaps in the collective contributions of the network, allied fields with which we might connect, and under-utilized theories that might have the potential to offer cross-cutting perspectives. Ironically, even as it concluded, the experience of producing this volume for me was one of awakening.