Developing students' literacy skills alongside their linguistic and intercultural competence via literary works, both textual and multimodal, has become an important component of foreign language (FL) curricula at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels in many countries. The development is predicated on the belief that, among other things, literature increases students' immersion in the target language, boosts their cultural knowledge, creativity, critical thinking skills, vocabulary and grammar knowledge, and enhances their pragmatic competence (Hall, 2015). Yet, to work with literature, students should possess some level of literary competence, that is, "the ability to draw meaning from a literary text by identifying the skills required for the analysis of the text, by applying them accordingly, and by being aware of what can be gained by applying these skills" (Paran et al., 2020, p. 327). In developing such competence, students' progress may be affected by traits like their reading orientation (i.e., how they respond to literature regardless of type or genre), creativity, or aesthetic awareness, among other things. However, research on literature (mostly of the purely textual variety) in language education has primarily explored students' and teachers' beliefs regarding the use of literature as a language resource, approaches to teaching with literature, and its effects on student motivation and achievement (see Paran, 2008). In contrast, few studies have investigated students' literary competence (e.g., Qutub, 2018) and the cognitive, affective, or psychological factors (including traits) that may influence it, especially in relation to both textual and multimodal literary texts. My presentation will report the findings from a 117-item online questionnaire-based study involving 265 university students in France who were studying English as an FL as part of their degree programs. The study explored their literary reading orientation, general aesthetic awareness, their literary competence when reading textual and multimodal literature via an online self-assessment, and the extent to which their general aesthetic awareness and reading orientation predicted their literary competence scores. The study's findings indicated that the participants' reading orientation drew strongly from Story-Driven Reading while their literary competence scores were significantly lower for textual literature than for multimodal literature. Moreover, their literary competence scores were statistically significantly predicted by certain components of their reading orientation and, to some extent, their general aesthetic competence. I will discuss the implications of these findings for teacher education programs and classroom instruction involving the use of literature as a language resource.
References:
Hall, G. (2015). Literature in language education. Springer.
Paran, A. (2008). The role of literature in instructed foreign language learning and teaching: An evidence-based survey. Language Teaching, 41(4), 465-496.
Paran, A., Spöttl, C., Ratheiser, U., & Eberharter, K. (2020). Measuring literary competences in SLA. In P. Winke, & T. Brunfaut (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and language testing (pp. 326-337). Routledge.
Qutub, M. (2018). Assessing literature for the classroom among female learners of English in an EFL context in Saudi Arabia. In S. Hidri (Ed.), Revisiting the assessment of second language abilities: From theory to practice (pp. 217-237). Springer.
