Hello.
This is Shannon Sauro.
In this segment, I’ll introduce you to the
concepts of fans, fandom, fanfiction, and
other fan practices for language learning.
Then, I'll share research on a particularly
successful second language user of English
who entered fandom with the deliberate goal
of developing her English, including her vocabulary,
but first, it’s necessary to provide the
background on some key terms.
I’ll start with “fans.”
When I talk about “fans” and “fandom,”
I’m often asked what it means to be a fan.
Fan studies, a subfield of cultural studies,
provides a good source of definitions.
Here’s one I particularly like: “The term
‘fan’ now covers a wide range of ordinary
people who [have] a positive emotional engagement
with popular culture.
That engagement may take the form of connection
with the text, image, performance or creative
signature of a public figure.
It might include love for a particular cultural
form or genre.”
In his excellent ethnography about “fans”
of the songwriter and singer Bruce Springsteen
in the late 1990s, Cavicchi provides another
definition that highlights the cultural component
of being a fan, which “is actually a much
wider social category, referring to a mode
of participation with a long history in a
variety of cultural activities, including
literature, sports, theater, film, and television.”
In both definitions, there’s reference to culture
which many might think of as the food, clothes, and traditions a society has,
but a more nuanced definition of culture also recognizes “the ideas,
customs, skills, [art] and tools that characterize a given group of people in a given period of time.”
Culture therefore includes high art as well as popular
art and media, and the equipment and places
associated with sports, for example.
By extension, it therefore includes the vocabulary
needed to talk about these things.
This broader definition also recognizes that
culture can belong to groups of people and
not just whole societies.
This includes communities of fans.
Fans have been around long before the Internet,
but Web 2.0 technologies, including many social
media sites, have helped lead to the growth
of online communities of fans known as fandoms.
Online fandoms, therefore, are “the local
and international networks of fans that develop
around a particular program, text or other
media product and which foster the sharing
of responses to the source material, including
the production of novel fan-generated content.”
Within these online fandoms, fans engage in
a great deal of interaction and many different,
often creative fan practices, perhaps the
best known of which is fanfiction, also defined
as “writing that continues, interrupts,
reimagines, or just riffs on stories and characters
other people have already written about.”
However, fanfiction is only one of the social
media practices that engage learners and therefore,
expose them to new vocabulary.
In this study of a fan, we’ll see other
fan practices that also lead to vocabulary
learning.
