The objective of this presentation is to indicate partial results of a research in Applied Linguistics, which investigates the impacts of the literary text in English classes of a public high school in the Southern region of Brazil. Amongst the reasons for this research focus, we point to the lack of encouragement for the use of literature in English classes in the new national curricular base for basic education (Brasil, 2018), together with heterogeneous levels of language proficiency and few weekly hours for the subject, which lead to the avoidance of the literary text by many teachers, who are also unfamiliar with strategies to work with it (Santos 2015; Cardoso 2021). Due to this, there are still sparse studies developed on this subject in the public high school context in Brazil (Garcia 2017; Viana and Zyngier 2020). For this investigation, lessons were built in the light of Sociocultural Historical Theory (SCHT) and aimed at inspiring literary literacy (Cosson 2015) - that is, the literary text is presented not as an item to be analysed and studied in terms of vocabulary and grammar, but as a literary artifact that provokes fruition. In order to do so, proper strategies were conducted from the choice of text to the activities proposed, taking into consideration the school context that is described above, in addition to the synchronous format imposed by Covid-19 pandemics. This demanded a necessary integration of mediation strategies to the on-line format, promoting new experiments on pre, during, and post-reading practices through different applications. Some partial findings from classes taught in 2021 indicate potentialities of working with literature as a means to lead students to literary literacy - a concept that is traditionally investigated in the first language - and critical literacy, which is so essential for our society (Solera 2020; Bertonha 2021). The partial analysis of productions written by students, derived from a proposal for writing inspired by the text that was read, demonstrates the relevance of opening more space for written production in foreign language in a more subjective way, providing access to what was called by Vygotsky as perezhivanie: a "lived experience", which can be more freely brought up by a second language (Lantolf and Swain 2019). It also dialogues with Kozulin's concept (1998) of life as authoring. One of the outcomes of the study being developed is to encourage practices with pre-service and in-service teachers so that they get more familiar with the potentialities of the literary text in English.
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