Taking Literature and Language Learning Online: New Perspectives on Teaching, Research and Technology

The use of literary texts in language classrooms is firmly established, but new questions arise with the transfer to remote teaching and learning. How do we teach literature online? How do learners react to being taught literature online? Will new genres emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic? Is the literary canon changing?

This volume celebrates the vitality of literary and pedagogic responses to the pandemic and presents research into the phenomena observed in this evolving field. One strand of the book discusses literary outputs stimulated by the pandemic as well as past pandemics. Another strand looks at the pedagogy of engaging learners with literature online, examining learners of different ages and of different proficiency levels and different educational backgrounds, including teacher education. Finally, a third strand looks at the affordances of various technologies for teaching online and the way they interact with literature and with language learning. The contributions in this volume take literature teaching online away from static lecturing strategies, present numerous options for online teaching, and provide research-based grounding for the implementation of these pedagogies.

Sandra Stadler-Heer is Senior Lecturer of TESOL at the Department of Linguistics and Literature, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany.

Amos Paran is Professor of TESOL at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, University College London, UK.