Multiliteracies: Teaching with short stories

Despite the recognizable advantages of exploiting literary works in the ESL classroom, language educators are challenged with not only addressing the cognitive and linguistic aspects of reading, but also emphasizing the sociocultural dimension of textual discourse. The Multiliteracies Framework for Language Teaching responds to this call by exploring reading as a socially situated practice during which learners interact with, analyze, and interpret texts, thereby promoting cross-cultural awareness and creative meaning construction. Towards that end, short stories offer a promising middle ground as textual resources due to their genre-specificity and rich thematic diversity. The following article provides a brief introduction to the MFLT and reading as meaning design (Part I) as well as two sample lesson plans based on Roald Dahl’s classic short story, The Umbrella Man (Part II).