Implying Levinasian Ethics to Support the Interaction of English Language Learners and Their English-Speaking Peers

• In Event: Roundtable Session 111
  In Roundtable Session: Second Language Acquisition Across Multiple Contexts

Abstract

Cultivating meaningful and sustained interaction among English language learners (ELLs) and their English-speaking peers is a desirable, yet often an elusive goal. In order to better understand the dynamics of such interaction, I explore how a group of ELLs and non-ELLs collaborated to create a video about their high school. In particular, I discuss interactional breakdowns paradoxically occurring around curriculum deliberately constructed to support interaction. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of relational ethics, I offer an alternative perspective to common curricular interventions designed to decrease the vulnerability and uncertainty associated with interaction across difference. I propose a responsive, improvisational stance that embraces these uncomfortable situations as opportunities for ethical response, instead of framing them as problems to be solved.

Author

• Anny Fritzen Case, Gonzaga University