This article presents an approach to literary texts that develops students' language proficiency, content knowledge, and analytical skills through the interweaving of three content areas—literary analysis, stylistics, and culture—at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels of the foreign language curriculum. Consistent with recommendations from the recent Modern Language Association (2007) report on foreign languages in higher education, this integrated approach develops students' translingual and transcultural competence by examining target language narratives from multiple perspectives. To ground this method, we review relevant research on literature in foreign language instruction and then present a sample lesson plan for teaching the Spanish‐language text Apocalipsis [Apocalypse] (Denevi, 1974) at the intermediate instructional level. The article concludes with suggestions and strategies for modifying the lesson plan for beginning and advanced levels.

This article presents a writing portfolio project whose primary goal is to integrate the development of projiciency skills, content knowledge, and grammatical competence through literary study. Excerpts from Queneau's (1947) Exercices de style, which tells the same story 99 times, serve as the basis for this portfolio project: These excerpts are both the input for grammar instruction and the model for student writing. Students prepare multiple drafts of their written texts according to a process‐oriented approach that includes peer review, self evaluation, and instructor feedback. Following an overview of relevant research, an outline of the portfolio project and student com mentaries are presented that provide empirical evidence of the perceived value of the project.

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.

This article outlines an approach to explicit grammar instruction that uses literary texts as comprehensible, meaning-bearing input. In this approach, which employs strategiesfrom the teaching of grammar and the teaching of reading, literary texts serve as the basis of the inductive presentation of new grammaticalforms and as a springboardfor communicative practice of theseforms after explicit instruction. The goal is to provide learners with meaning-bearing input to assist their acquisition of grammaticalforms, to raise students' consciousness about the target language, to encourage meaningjid communication among learners, and to develop skills and strategies in the reading ofliterary texts. The presentation of the proposed technique is followed by an example of teaching French relative pronouns based upon Prdert's (I 949) poem "Le Message."

This review examines research on advanced‐level foreign language (FL) teaching and learning in collegiate contexts with a particular focus on the merging of language and literary‐cultural content. The overarching question framing this review is: What is the relationship between language, literature, and culture, and how are they instantiated through FL curricula and instruction at the advanced level? To respond to this question, language and literary‐cultural content in advanced FL contexts are addressed from the perspective of three trends evidenced in published research: (1) conceptualizations of literature and culture within the advanced‐level curriculum, (2) integration of language and literary‐cultural content at the course level, and (3) incorporation of advanced language and content at the curricular level. The review concludes by identifying overarching themes and directions for future research.