Meaning & Feeling
Jay Lemke
University of Michigan
jaylemke@umich.edu
A feeling for the organism
• How do we feel, bodily and emotionally,
when we mean with and speak in a
particular language/dialect?
• What is the role of affectivity in learning to
use a language across times, sites, and
media?
• How do we begin to answer these
questions?
An Appetizer
Feeling & Meaning
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We feel when we mean
We feel when we learn
“You feel, you learn” [Alanis]
We mean, feel, and learn across time
On and across multiple timescales
Feeling-and-meaning is situated,
distributed, and social
Meaning & Feeling
• Semiotics as formal analysis of meaning
affordances – the possible
• Phenomenology in pursuit of the actual – feelings,
embodiment, pacing and dynamics
• Meaning-making as a felt and feelingful process:
feeling and meaning inseparable
• 1st person experiencing, 2nd person interactivity,
3rd person analytics
Make Love not War ?
Learning across Time
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Learning as an aspect of development
Learning as transient vs. maintained
Learning along life traversals
Across settings and timescales
The relevance of the past to the present:
retrospective view of learning
• What keeps learning alive and growing?
Affect in Language
• Feelings vs. feeling-expressions in a
language
• Affects, emotions, and appraisals: semantics
and language ideology
• The Big List
• Cultural specificity of emotions
• Feelings as relational, interactive, and
distributed social phenomena
Affect & Language Learning
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How we feel about a language
How we feel when speaking a language
How we speak our feelings in a language
How we learn new feelings in a language
How to take feeling into account in designing
language learning environments?
Affect, Identity, & Learning
• Social-affective learning along traversals
• Across settings & timescales: issues of
continuity and maintenance of learning
• Within and across quotidian, mixed, and
virtual learning environments
• Who we can be when using a language in
old and new settings
MMO GameWorld
Affect & Designs for Learning
• Commercial video and computer games as
models for affect-inclusive design
• Reciprocal responsiveness and the
amplified role of feeling in interaction
• Immersion and affective realisms
• Chronotopes and chronopaths
• Traversing realities
Research Strategies
• Complicating the semantics of affect
• Integrating semiotic and phenomenological
approaches & data
• Mapping chronopaths in realtime video
• Analyzing video of virtual worlds
• Documenting learning across time and place
• Attending to researcher feelings
With feeling!