2023 Nóra Wünsch-Nagy: Integrating LCT into research & teaching it to others: Solving the challenges

While conducting my doctoral research on designing a course on multimodal literacy development for English majors and teacher trainees, I faced two challenges in terms of working with LCT. First, no one in my environment was familiar with LCT, and I had to convince my supervisors and professors that the working with LCT will make my dissertation more valuable. Their immediate reactions included confusion, skepticism and careful enthusiasm. My own mistakes in introducing LCT to others - including my students - led me to explore ways of presenting it to new audiences. Second, my initial research plan included several linguistic and pedagogical frameworks, and LCT was introduced at various stages during the four terms of the project. It meant finding ways of combining LCT with other powerful theoretical and analytical approaches. Working with the Specialization and Semantics dimensions provided answers to gaps in my data analysis, and by the end of the project, LCT permeated all levels of my research from task through course design and data analysis. In this Roundtable, I will show my answers to typical questions in environments where you are the only person working with LCT, and I will present my solutions for integrating LCT at different stages of research projects.