Language Education and Multilingualism – The Langscape Journal Vol. 7

Literary texts have played an important role in foreign language teaching for decades. In the days of grammar-translation method, the teaching and learning of languages was seen in terms of formal education treating literature as examples of ‘high culture’. Accordingly, reading a canon of "classic" literary texts was a central focus of foreign language teaching: Shakespeare and Dickens in English classes, Voltaire and Molière in French classes, Cervantes and Lope de Vega in Spanish classes, Goethe and Kafka in German classes. With the communicative turn, this literary canon is being expanded: contemporary literature, Children’s and Youth Adults’ Literature (CYAL), and multimodal texts such as graphic novels and comics are increasingly being integrated into official curricula of foreign language teaching. Also, traditional literary canons have been questioned and reformulated to include postcolonial literature, i.e., literary texts from the entire anglophone, francophone or hispanophone world, e.g., authors writing from postcolonial perspectives such as Tahar ben Jelloun, Chinua Achebe, Isabel Allende, or from a background of migration (e.g., Azouz Begag, Gino Chiellino, Jordi Sierra i Fabra). Pedagogies and approaches to teaching literature also connect with the goals of intercultural education and see the confrontation with literary foreignness as a meaningful way of promoting intercultural competences. Pedagogies encourage readers to engage with the unfamiliar in fictional reality, get to know a wide range of different worlds and lifestyles, and expand their linguistic and content-related competences. In recent years, multilingual literary texts have drawn more interest from educators in which authors express themselves literarily in two or more languages within a single text. These literary border crossings experiment with the interplay of languages, with questions of identity and language, be it for self-expression or in interaction with a multilingual readership. Further examples can be found in Chicano/a literature (Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, etc.), in multilingual song texts (e.g., Stephan Eicher: Taxi Europa) or in modern films where authenticity is realised using different mother tongues (e.g., “Inglorious Basterds”).