| An increasing amount of Applied Linguistics research calls for the integration of language and literature in foreign language education in reaction to the typical separation of these two disciplines in the traditional curriculum. The present classroom-based empirical study illustrates through the description of a literature-through-language course for third-year students of Spanish how literature and language can be organically integrated in foreign language education. The proposed pedagogy suggests the creation of a problem in the literary text that students have to solve by rewriting, reconstructing or transforming the work through mediating tools in the form of linguistic concepts. This study also examines the impact of literature-through-language instruction on students' discourse proficiency, as well as their attitudes towards language, language learning, and literature. Data was obtained from students' portfolios, compositions, and interviews. The method of data analysis was historical or genetic. The analysis shows how traditional empirical rules initially hampered students' creativity and their understanding of how (literary) texts evoke meaning in implicit ways. In contrast, as the literature-through-language course progressed, students' written production and reflections revealed their increasing efforts to compose meaning through lexicogrammatical and textual choices (rather than explicitly in the propositional content) in their compositions as a result of the recontextualization of conceptual knowledge appropriated in reconstructing activities with literary texts. Finally, learners' comments seem to indicate a reconceptualization of language as a creative tool for personal meaning rather than as a set of constraining rules. Students also commented on the relevance of a literary treatment of language for foreign language learning. |
