Based on examples of learners’ engagements with literary texts, this talk argues that aesthetic reading can help to expand current paradigms of second language literacy development and can thus create imaginative spaces in which learners can explore and reflect on their developing positions as multilingual subjects.
Over the past couple of decades "literacy" has emerged as a key critical term in second language teaching and learning. This has been driven by a renewed and re-theorized interest in how text-based practices mediate and are mediated by human activity across diverse media, linguistic, and discursive channels often captured by term "multiliteracies" (New London Group, 1996). Accordingly, literacy frameworks are associated with an increased attention to in how culturally-specific literacy practices afford different ways of designing meaning in different languages. Within the context of these shifting paradigms, this talk will consider the particular potential of literary language in fostering language learners' multiple literacies through an awareness of how authors and composers play with available meaning designs. Based on a study from two collegiate German as a foreign language classes, this talk proposes a meta-language for conceptualizing creative literacy activities as design play. An analysis of learner compositions from the classes suggests that the playful stance afforded by literariness may afford learners an opportunity to notice and tinker with elements of design that are often neglected and suggests preliminary connections between design play and the selection of texts and corresponding instructional activities.
