TLTC Lecture Series: Semiotic Flows, Bricolage, and Critical Language Awareness

Steven L. Thorne, Ph. D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics and affiliated faculty in Communication Arts and Sciences. Thorne also serves as the associate director of the Center for Language Acquisition and as a project co-director and advisor for mediated learning at the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (a National Foreign Language Resource Center) at Penn State. He received an M.A. (in Hindi and Urdu) and Ph.D. (in Education in Language, Literacy, and Culture) from the University of California at Berkeley. His work investigates semiotic mediation with a focus on second and foreign language development and Internet-mediated communicative activity. Specific areas of interest include interpenetrations between historically differentiated systems of activity, the cultures-of-use of Internet communication tools, multiplayer online gaming, intercultural communication, and work on language theory that draws upon cultural-historical activity theory, contextual traditions of language analysis, cognitive linguistics, and usage-based approaches to language development. Increasingly he is thinking about the interface between life activity, learning, and cognitive neuroscience. Over the years he has presented talks, workshops and seminars on a variety of language-related topics including Internet communication and information technologies, intercultural communication, Vygotskian and cultural-historical activity theory, corpus linguistics, additional language learning, and indigenous language revitalization.