Efficient and Effective L2 Literature Education through Backward Design

Description

Literature inclusion in L2 education is symptomatic of a lack of thoughtful focus and clearly directed goals. L2 literature lessons often show traditional planning mistakes where teachers concentrate on what they have to teach instead of why their students have to learn the content in the first place. The suggested reform made by the MLA in 2007 to move towards an integrated language and literature curriculum within higher education should in fact already take place in secondary education because these students are the future public of literature. A unified L2 curriculum has the potential to fulfil all three functions of (language) education: qualification, socialisation, and subjectivation (Biesta, 2010). Depending on the context and audience, L2 teachers should be able to design lessons in which these three functions are adequately represented in order to effectively include literature in their language lessons. In Wiggins and McTighe’s (1995) 3-step model for curriculum development, which centres around the concept of Backward Design, teachers [1] identify the desired results of their lessons, [2] determine acceptable evidence to assess whether the desired results are achieved, and [3]  plan their lessons accordingly. This paper presents a teacher training programme based on the 3-step model of Backward Design where (future) L2 teachers learn how to effectively design their L2 literature lessons. The core of this programme focuses on the specific context and audience of each teacher that functions as a starting point to create explicit and transparent learning objectives which together potentially achieve the three functions of education.

Period	9-Jan-2016
Held at	Modern Language Association, United States