About

Chantelle Warner is an Associate Professor of German Studies and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. Her teaching and research interests primarily focus on applied linguistics, literacy studies, stylistics, and foreign language education. Warner's research explores multiple language use as a site of struggle, creativity, play, and resistance. She is particularly interested in the social, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of literacy practices across languages and how these practices are evaluated and valued by speakers and readers, especially those who are relative newcomers to the languages and cultures involved. This interest has led her to engage with a variety of media and modalities, including poetry, digital games, personal narratives, and social media sites. In addition to her research, Warner is the founding co-editor of the journal Critical Multilingualism Studies. She also co-directs the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL), a Title IV Language Resource Center at the University of Arizona. Her work contributes to understanding language learning beyond traditional frameworks by emphasizing the lived experiences of multilingual subjects and the complex social and emotional labor involved in language education. Through her scholarship, she addresses how language learners navigate and construct identities and subjectivities in multilingual and multicultural contexts, often challenging dominant commodifying discourses of language learning.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Pedagogy
• Linguistics
• Political Science
• Literature
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Philosophy
• Communication
• Law
• Art

Selected publications

• Agile Language Program Administration

  2025-06-06

  book-chapterSenior author

  Although most language program administrators (LPAs) are not formally trained to deal with crises that arise in programs they oversee, responding to complex situations is a normal part of the work that LPAs do. Drawing on insights from organizational development, this chapter offers a conceptual framework for understanding change and crisis management in LPA work. At the center of the discussion is the construct of organizational agility, the ability to discern and adapt to changes efficiently and effectively. To deal with change in the workplace, the agility framework encourages leaders to cultivate three areas in their work: psychological safety, decision-making, and a culture of sharing and experimenting with others. To illustrate these principles, two short vignettes representing complex situations that LPAs may encounter at different levels of influence are presented: one global and unanticipated, as seen in the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the other local and intended in the context of revamping collegiate language curricula. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research on how LPAs can navigate and respond to change where appropriate.

  PublisherDOI

• Multiliteracies-Based Approaches to CALL

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Multiliteracy Play

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc eBooks · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  <JATS1:p>This book proposes to expand multiliteracies frameworks in second language education, by recognizing that learning a new language and culture involves both designs and desires, the affects and emotions that feed our responses to particular ways of making meaning.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Over the past two decades, multiliteracies approaches to second language education have brought attention to the diversity of modes, media, language varieties, and discourses involved in what we often shorthand as language learning. A core concept in these discussions is the idea of meaning design, the idea that languages are dynamic, culturally-shaped systems of resources for engaging with and making sense of the world.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Building on these discussions and drawing inspiration and practical examples from a variety of modern language classes in higher education in the USA, the book demonstrates how poetic and playful language can be embedded in multiliteracies pedagogy in ways that foster learners’ and teachers’ awareness of designs, while also making space for desires that are harder to script or plan for. In addition to building a conceptual map around poetics and play for researchers and teachers in language education, the book offers concrete examples of what a multiliteracies approach emphasizing designs and desires can look like in classrooms and curricula.</JATS1:p>

  PublisherDOI

• 12 Feeling Through Technology : Affect and Emotional Attachments During Remote Teaching

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2024-12-31 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Can frameworks for language learning be <i>multilingually</i> indifferent?

  The German Quarterly · 2023-06-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We can turn to two standardizing documents that affect and mediate the choices educators and, now, state evaluators make vis-a-vis language and multilingualism: the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements, collaboratively published by the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 2017, and the 2018 Companion Volume to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; see also Warner). While both documents are ostensibly models for multilingual practice (and for the teaching and learning of second or additional languages), both—albeit in different ways—exhibit ideological dispositions that could be described as multilingually indifferent. As the preeminent professional organization for language educators in the United States, ACTFL is also the creator and disseminator of the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, which came into existence at the start of the proficiency movement in the 1980s and, since the early 1990s, has established itself as the primary standardizing document in US-based language teaching and learning. The original ACTFL guidelines for oral competence were developed in 1982; a more detailed version of the guidelines was then published in 1996 as Standards for Foreign Language Learning, while the first version of the ACTFL Can-Do Statements appeared two years later. By this point, they included tests and scales for what they designated as the four skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. These Can-Do Statements were most recently revised in 2017 as part of a collaboration with NCSSFL. This was notably also the first time that they included a set of standards for intercultural communicative competence (ICC), which they define as “the ability to interact effectively and appropriately with people from other language and cultural backgrounds” (NCSSFL-ACTFL). They state further that “ICC develops as the result of a process of intentional goal-setting and self-reflection around language and culture and involves attitudinal changes toward one's own and other cultures. Intercultural communicative competence is essential for establishing effective, positive relationships across cultural boundaries, required in a global society” (NCSSFL-ACTFL). This is a crucial and revealing aspect of the Statements: ICC is tethered to proficiency in the target language. The capacity for reflection about language is implicitly expected to remain reserved for those with superior command of an additional language. Overwhelmingly, then, the framing of the NCSSFL-ACTFL model subordinates all capabilities under communicative competence in a presumably singular language that language learners are pursuing, leaving multilingualism outside of the scope. For its part, the CEFR was published in 2001, quite a bit later than the original ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, but it is likewise a product of the proficiency movements of the 1980s and 1990s. It is thus organized around what is self-described as an action-oriented approach, presented in scales of can-do descriptors. The CEFR Companion Volume with New Descriptors (henceforth Companion), published in 2018, included a further development of the interrelated concepts of plurilingual competence and pluricultural competence from the original document. In the Companion, these pluricompetences divide into three further subcategories: building on a pluricultural repertoire, which corresponds most closely to the NCSSFL-ACTFL notion of ICC and involves a sensitivity to differences in conventions and cues; plurilingual comprehension, involving the capacity to leverage proficiency in one or more languages to approach texts in other languages and achieve a communication goal; and building on a plurilingual repertoire, the ability to leverage proficiency in one or more languages to flexibly interact in another language and communicate effectively. While multilingualism is most emphasized in the latter two categories, all three point to the movement between multiple languages and the value of partial proficiencies and limited linguistic repertoires. This integration of plurilingualism in the Companion is notable, especially when seen in comparison with the NCSSFL-ACTFL model and the earlier scales in the CEFR, because it suggests that communicative competence is not located in a single linguistic code or repertoire. But, for all of the ways in which the pluricompetences expand the concept of communicative competence and leave it less linguistically flattened, they are ultimately also dominated by an idealized model of communication in which social actors are rationally oriented toward a clearly defined goal and misunderstandings can and should be avoided. Ambiguity and polysemy are all but absent and only seem to reside in the tensions between different languages and cultures—which are, of course, to be overcome. The idea that polysemy and ambiguity can be productive, desirable, and even necessary is not taken into account. Texts are thus primarily objects for comprehension; with the exception of the C2 level of building on a plurilingual repertoire, which references the use of language for “rhetorical effect of fun” (128), interaction is a means of getting things done. The updated CEFR guidelines work to acknowledge multilingualism, and both the NCSSFL-ACTFL and the CEFR descriptors attempt to integrate semiodiversity under the headers of ICC or pluricultural competence. But both scales also posit idealized views of communication that remain indifferent to the complexity of language mediation and linguistic diversity, as well as to the political economies and systems of power within which they operate. Given that these scales inform the proficiency levels assessed by an ever-growing language teaching and testing industry and by the nation-states that contract with it, educators and scholars of German must ask themselves how they shape not only our profession but also our learners’ views of what it means to know, use, and live in multiple language(s) in different ways at once. We must also consider how the transdisciplinary contributions of the field of German Studies can inform different, more multilingually hospitable frameworks for envisioning language and linguistic development.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Forum on linguistic indifference: Combined works cited

  The German Quarterly · 2023-06-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction: On linguistic indifference

  The German Quarterly · 2023-06-01

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Literary pragmatics and stylistics

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • Literature
  • Art

  Literary pragmatics and pragmatic stylistics have emerged out of work within this field and share these same concerns regard to literary texts. While various theories and scholars devote varying degrees of attention to the formal features of literary works, pragmatic approaches share in common an understanding of language, including literary language, as most importantly a form of symbolic social action. From a pragmatic viewpoint, considerations of literary style are inextricable from questions of context, including speakers’ and readers’ identities, intentions, beliefs, and frames of relevance. Leech's work points to the close relationship that literary pragmatics and stylistics have shared since at least the early 1970s, as stylistics began to expand into an ever more interdisciplinary field. Scholars within stylistics have seen a correlation between this aspect of Grice's theories and the concept of foregrounding, linguistic means of shifting interactants’ attention to aspects of the speech.

  PublisherDOI

• Reader Response, Aesthetics, and Deep Learning in the German Language-Culture Classroom

  2022-11-29

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Literacy/multiliteracies and foreign language education

  Elsevier eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Linguistics
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Gramling

  12 shared

• Wenhao Diao

  University of Arizona

  2 shared

• Béatrice Dupuy

  2 shared

• Amanda Snell

  University of Arizona

  2 shared

• Patrick Ploschnitzki

  2 shared

• Chad Wellmon

  University of Virginia

  1 shared

• Kristin Lange

  Elon University

  1 shared

• Caroline L. Rieger

  University of British Columbia

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) Prize for best ar…