124080 VK BEd 08a.3: VK Literature and Language Education (2024S)

It’s not true that young people don’t read these days: they just read differently. This course explores popular narratives in many media forms and their fan worlds to consider ways of fostering the elusive EFL goal of creating intrinsic motivation and avid readers. We do this by investigating our own engagement with popular literature and its media worlds, including graphic fiction, computer games, fan forums, Goodreads and BookTok, and our own fannish creativity (if any). Working with the concept of ‘genre worlds’ (Fletcher et al 2022), the participatory culture of fandom (Jenkins), and EFL approaches to teaching new media and fandom (Booth 2015), we take a cultural-studies approach to the literary text, the publishing industry, media and gaming tie-ins, and the social world of fan communities to look at the big picture of how popular fictional worlds and genres intersect and interact, all the while considering how we might activate this in the EFL classroom.
The class models this exploration with the media world of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper (tumblr webcomic, paperbacks, Netflix series, fanfic, fanart, celebrity culture). Your task for an EFL materials workshop and a seminar paper or BA thesis is to work with one of your own favourite media worlds (eg. Twilight, Bridgerton, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Game of Thrones, Fortnite, any other YA, romance, thriller, sci-fi fantasy world with multiple media forms). Students work individually and together to create a corpus of teaching activities that they can share and use in their own classroom praxis. Students with access to a school class this semester are encouraged to try out their genre world and/or teaching activities as a small action-research project suitable for a seminar paper or bachelor thesis.
Aims:
The course introduces students to analytical techniques appropriate to each of the multimedia forms, including narrative perspective, social semiotics, game theory, and critical fan studies.
Students develop a language for identifying features of popular fiction/media genres, uncover the formal mechanics of the textual, social, and publishing ‘genre world,’ including critiquing the methods and types of fan-created fiction and new media.
Students identify aspects of popular media worlds suitable for the EFL classroom, including connecting these texts to course book/Matura topics and LehrplanNEU ‘übergreifende Themen,’ and using them to teach media literacy and critical thinking skills.