Kate Paesani

Research in Language-Literature Instruction: Meeting the Call for Change?

The purpose of this review is to assess whether recent scholarship on language-literature instruction—the deliberate integration of language development and literary study at all levels of the foreign language curriculum—within the context of U.S. institutions of higher education reflects shifts in thinking regarding the role of literature in foreign language curricula. These shifts have come in response to the 2007 Report of the Modern Language Association Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, which recommended replacing the traditional two-tiered program structure with more coherent curricula that merge language and content, and to the general questioning of communicative language teaching as a viable method for language instruction and adequate preparation for advanced-level work in a foreign language. Current approaches to language-literature instruction and foreign language curriculum design favor multimodal language development that places equal importance on oral and written language and interpretative interaction with literature to construct textual meaning and establish form-meaning connections. This review surveys empirical and classroom practice research on literature in language courses and language in literature courses and concludes with a consideration of larger curricular issues and areas for future research.

Analysing foreign language instructional materials through the lens of the multiliteracies framework

ABSTRACT Literacy, understood as a socially situated process of making meaning from texts, has been offered as a conceptual solution to collegiate foreign language curricular divisions, and multiliteracies pedagogy as a means of implementing that solution. Within multiliteracies pedagogy, the knowledge processes framework [Kalantzis, M., Cope, B., Chan, E., & Dalley-Trim, L. (2016). Literacies (2nd ed.). Melbourne: Cambridge University Press] facilitates deep engagement with texts and development of advanced language and literacy skills. As more programmes adopt this conceptualisation of literacy as a programmatic goal, additional research is needed to understand how this framework is applied in materials design and implementation. In response, this article documents the materials analysis of multiliteracies lesson plans developed as part of a revised lower-level collegiate Spanish curriculum. Using the knowledge process framework as an analytical lens, study participants examined 25 lessons targeting interpretive communication from two different courses. Results reveal an overwhelming emphasis on the knowledge process of experiencing; the knowledge processes of conceptualising, analysing, and applying occur much less frequently. The authors discuss conceptual and pedagogical factors contributing to the findings and implications for teacher development and student learning in collegiate foreign language contexts.