Authors of everyday life. Towards learning with literary learner texts in English language education

Abstract

In the digital realm of the 21st century, the production and distribution of literature has changed drastically; writing literary texts is no longer a privilege of professional authors and publishers but has transformed into a participatory practice, with non-professional writers sharing their own literary narratives via social media platforms. This digital practice has become particularly relevant among teenagers and young adults as they increasingly use the opportunity of producing and sharing their own literary texts as a means of negotiating their identities and the social environments around them. Literature, thus, enables teenagers to participate in society by voicing their own personal and social concerns. Given their value in the context of engaging in these meaning-making processes on the one hand, and the role and importance of English as one of the lingua francas in digital realms on the other, these digital literary practices also need to be reflected in contemporary English language education (ELE). However, this hardly seems to be the case so far. Although literary texts still play a very prominent role, particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms in Germany, current approaches to learning with literature still appear to perceive learners as recipients of professional literary texts, while production-oriented perspectives on teenagers as authors of their everyday lives, which go beyond post-reading creative tasks, seem to hold a most marginal position. Thus, digital texts written by learners (i.e., literary learner texts) are hardly considered as source texts. This theoretical contribution argues that contemporary practices of learning with literature need to be complemented by also focusing on literary works created by learners on multiple levels of classroom action. Drawing on interdisciplinary concepts, it explores the relevance of this focus in detail and makes first suggestions for framing literature classrooms based on literary learner texts.