ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors present exploration of ePortfolios to enhance language learning and address these challenges in two language programs, beginning and intermediate French and Spanish. Second language pedagogy in the United States is grounded in the notion of communicative competence, currently understood in the discipline as the ability “to communicate effectively and interact with cultural competence to participate in multilingual communities at home and around the world”. Recognizing that a critical awareness of relationships between texts, contexts, and discourse conventions is fundamental to world language education, Kern advocates an expanded understanding of literacy as a “dynamic set of linguistic, social, and cognitive processes that are culturally-motivated,” a view of literacy that includes “an additional component of active reflection on how meanings are constructed and negotiated in particular acts of communication”. Individual multimodal artifacts of learning are explicitly and implicitly linked in the ePortfolio, creating an implicit dialogue between artifacts for student and for the readers of the ePortfolio.
