Key principles for an integrated intercultural literary pedagogy: An educational design research project on arts integration for intercultural competence

Abstract

Intercultural competence in foreign language teaching has gained importance in recent times. Although current work has highlighted the advantages of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) for intercultural development, little is known about its potential for teaching literature in secondary schools. Treating literature itself as an art form, the aim of this article is to formulate research-based design principles for an integrated intercultural literary pedagogy (IILP) that may foster intercultural competence through arts integration in foreign language classes. This article reports on the process of evaluating IILP-based pilot lesson materials in pre-university education in the Netherlands. Educational design research was applied as a method that encompasses the systematic study of designing, developing, and evaluating educational interventions through an iterative process of evaluation with stakeholders. Three iterations of formative evaluation were conducted, with additions to the tentative design principles following each of the first two iterations. The process resulted in a set of four refined principles. Results also illustrated the effectiveness of IILP-based lesson materials for intercultural competence. Although participating students encountered some difficulties relating to the functionality of the design, the students appreciated its social relevance and reported that the processing of literary texts through dialogic tasks with peers in the target language fostered intercultural language learning.

Integrating intercultural literary competence

“…While we are aware that analyzing student texts in L1 about literature evidently would have generated higher levels of CCA, we consciously chose to analyze student texts in L2, as it is our belief that language and culture should be learned in an integrated way (Kramsch, 1996). In addition, all lessons were approached from a CLIL paradigm where L2 output is a key element for processing content (Schat et al, 2021b; see Chapter 5). As our thematic analysis was aimed at exploring CCA and confined to the content of the L2 student texts, the excerpts used will contain, for example, grammatical and lexical errors.…”

“…Schat, E., van der Knaap, E., & de Graaff, R. (2021b). Key principles for an integrated intercultural literary pedagogy: An educational design research project on arts integration for intercultural competence.…”

“…However, does this also apply to literature lessons? In an earlier study (Schat et al, 2021b; see Chapter 5) we explained four design principles for Integrated Intercultural Literary Pedagogy for text selection and task design, formulated along four parameters of CLIL pedagogy, i.e., culture, content, communication, and cognition, (Coyle et al, 2010) that we will discuss below.…”

“…Although the IILP seems to be a promising method to advance secondary school students' intercultural development (Schat et al, 2021b; see Chapter 5), no statements based on empirical arguments can be made about it. We have not been able to show whether students' intercultural competence improved, due to the lack of evaluation instruments in Dutch (Fasoglio & Canton, 2009;; see Chapter 2) and international instruments aimed at the secondary level are scarce (Fantini, 2009).…”

“…First, we set out the theories that served as foundations to our pedagogy and describe the aims that follow. After that, we describe pedagogical principles (Schat et al, 2021b; see Chapter 5) along the 4Cs framework (Coyle et al, 2010).…”