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Popular Science Fiction Television for the Language Educator: Black Mirror as a Potential Teaching Tool in the ICLHE Classroom

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Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education

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  • The original version of this chapter was revised: The author’s name has been changed from “K. L. E. Marissa” to ‘Marissa K. L. E.’. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4559-5_13

Abstract

This chapter offers a proposal of how a multimodal social semiotic approach based on a multiliteracies paradigm can possibly be used in the Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE) classroom. The multiliteracies paradigm has been shown to be effective at engaging students with its utilization of varied modalities that cater to different learner needs and interests. Using the popular science fiction television anthology series Black Mirror as a trigger for deep student engagement, we describe a hypothetical approach for how first-year university undergraduates can be introduced to threshold concepts like neoliberal governmentality and marketization that have typically been associated with neoliberalism. Such threshold concepts may be difficult to comprehend in the typically monomodal form that is characteristic of most conventional academic literature. Taking into account this challenge, together with the awareness of how many of these students form part of the burgeoning collective of youth who typically possess a proclivity for the digital medium, we focus here on the learning material language educators in the ICLHE classroom can use to engage students in learning threshold concepts that are necessary for them to write reasonably competent expository essays as beginning academics.

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  • 22 February 2023

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://multimodal-analysis.com/products/multimodal-analysis-video/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Marissa K. L. E. & Sabine Tan

  2. Curtin University, Perth, Australia

    Sabine Tan

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  1. Marissa K. L. E.
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  2. Sabine Tan
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Correspondence to Marissa K. L. E. .

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  1. Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Mark Brooke

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Marissa K. L. E., Tan, S. (2022). Popular Science Fiction Television for the Language Educator: Black Mirror as a Potential Teaching Tool in the ICLHE Classroom. In: Brooke, M. (eds) Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4559-5_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4559-5_7

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