The paper presents the findings of a research project that explores the impact on Foreign Language Learning of a pedagogical approach that brings together literature and digital technology. Specifically, the study investigates how combining the analysis of literary texts with the creation of a multimodal composition, could help students generate communicative artefacts that simultaneously adhere to genre stylistic features and respond to personal expressive intentions.
The purpose of the project is to contribute re-establishing the role of the expressive and aesthetic functions of language, reasserting the educational role of language learning (Paran, 2008), and re-focusing attention on learners as sensitive and emotional beings (Kramsch, 2006).
The study, which draws on the theoretical framework of the multiliteracies approach (Kern, 2003; Paesani, Allen & Dupuy, 2016), takes the form of a qualitative case study: 11 first and second-year undergraduate students of Italian as Foreign Language have been engaged in creating a digital story (a short digital video based on a script of 250-350 words that combines the author's narrative voiceover with a variety of multimedia tools, such as photographs, music, sounds) after being exposed to a literary text and instructed on its stylistic features.
The paper explores: a) how students' "voice" – a sign of a personal and emotional involvement in the meaning-making process (Bakhtin, 1981), emerges in the digital story and b) how the analysis of literary texts helps students become more strategic and reflective writer by making them aware of the relation between linguistic forms and meaning.
The findings are based on multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) of students' digital artefacts and content analysis of individual reflective interviews. The MDA is undertaken by applying the Appraisal Framework (Martin & White, 2005), an approach that aims at understanding how different resources are used by the writer/speaker to negotiate and amplify emotions, judgments, and evaluations (Martin, 2000).
