Jessica Adams on Virtual Reality Narratives at the AAAL

Jessica Adams on Virtual Reality Narratives at the AAAL

Jessica Adams received a Spring 2019 BCNM Conference Grant to help cover her costs attending the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Jessica presented "Envisioning the Globe: Symbolic Competence in 360-Degree, Virtual Reality Narratives." Read more about her experience in her own words below!

I traveled to Atlanta, GA for the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference in early March to present a paper called “Envisioning the Globe: Symbolic Competence in 360-Degree, Virtual Reality Narratives.” AAAL brings together researchers studying language-in-use on a range of topics: language and technology, language in education, literacy, language policy, second language acquisition, and more! At the conference, I enjoyed visiting a panel on digital cross-cultural exchanges between second language learners, and a panel that theorized meaning-making as drawing on linguistic, spatial and material resources.

I presented a position paper on a research project I conducted with my adviser Dr. Glynda Hull and fellow graduate students in the Graduate School of Education. Our research project connected high school students in the US and India through creating and sharing “immersive” digital stories composed via virtual reality technology. In this presentation, I analyzed the creation of an immersive digital story by a student group in India, exploring the students’ linguistic and modal choices as they composed a story about their city and its historical and political importance for India. The presentation focused on how the pressures of composing for a distant or “global” audience as well as composing with a new modality, 360-degree space led to tensions between authenticity and global transportability and authorial design and enhanced viewer agency in 360-space.