Questioning the Text: Advancing Literary Reading in the Second Language Through Web‐Based Strategy Training

Abstract

This study assessed language learners' perceptions of an instructional approach to literary reading in the second language. The approach under investigation is based on a Web tutorial that teaches questioning strategies. Seventy‐eight German students enrolled at a state university in the United States participated in the study. Questionnaire data suggest that most of the learners perceived the approach positively in regard to its impact in facilitating the development of literary reading competencies in the second language. Students with positive perceptions about the Web tutorial were more likely to report a positive affective response to the literary texts and a higher motivation to continue the study of German beyond the university's foreign language requirement.

Moving toward multiliteracies in foreign language teaching: Past and present perspectives … and beyond

“…Early and subsequent scholarly work related to these notions appeared in numerous books and journals, including Foreign Language Annals (Arens & Swaffar, 2000;Barrette, Paesani, & Vinall, 2010;Péron, 2010;Tesser & Long, 2000;Troyan, 2016;Urlaub, 2013;Warford & White, 2012), primarily centering on issues of curricular and instructional frameworks and the kinds of textual work that need to be instantiated in classrooms. As a way to address the issue of bifurcation and the need to unify the undergraduate FL curriculum, Arens and Swaffar (2000) considered how ACTFL's Standards (National Standards, 1996) could enable learners to develop literacy, not as language only but as an integrated set of linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural skills.…”

Exploring EFL literature approaches in Dutch secondary education

“…Literature not only gives access to a plethora of cultures (Hoecherl-Alden, 2006;Urlaub, 2013) but also allows for cross-cultural comparing (Gholson & Stumpf, 2005) and challenging pre-conceived notions of culture (Costello, 1990), thereby promoting intercultural and critical cultural awareness (Byram, 2014;Kramsch, 1998).…”