Text as technology: a pedagogical roadmap to Gen-AI’s didactic potential in manipulating visual media in foreign language instruction

This article examines Birgit Weyhe’s graphic novel Rude Girl (2022) as an applied case study to rethink multimodal literary texts as hybrid technotexts. It foregrounds how learners can productively engage with and transform these texts using Gen-AI in foreign language instruction. Building on media and technology theory, the paper develops a framework for German as a Foreign Language (GFL) teaching that draws on Stiegler, Foucault, and Haraway. It helps learners explore how images and texts work together to create meaning, including ideas of identity such as race and gender. Through Rude Girl’s dual-layered storytelling, which brings visual modality, figures and narrative voice into dialogue with social concepts and historical experience, the article positions textual learning artefacts as relational, interactive, and open to reinterpretation. The central contribution is a structured teaching approach, where learners critically engage with AI tools to remix panels, adapt images, and explore alternative storylines. This process cultivates critical media literacy, creative language use, and reflective awareness of authorship, ethics, and learner agency in the digital age.