The Stanford Non-Native Rapper Contest: Fostering Transcultural Competences Using Social Media

Abstract

The Stanford Non-Native Rapper Contest is an annual event organized by the Digital Language Lab at Stanford University. Ev ery year, language instructors encourage undergraduate learners to eng age in a creative project: learners receive the opportunity to compos e rap music, write lyrics in the target language, produce videos, and share their clips via a YouTube channel. The response from undergraduate st udents has been positive: since the contest’s inception in 2008, al most 50 learners of world languages and of less-commonly taught languages hav e p rticipated, and their clips have been viewed by more than 30,000 in ternet users in less than three years. The first part of this article de scribes the evolution of the project and outlines the roles of the language lab f cilities and its staff members in organizing this collaborative learning e nvironment. The second part of the article will contextualize Stanf ord’s Non-Native Rapper Contest within current theoretical debates that rel at to the acquisition of transcultural competences and to alternative assess m nt in collegiate language learning environments.