The goal of content-based instruction (CBI) is to teach the subject—not the language—with the goal of providing genuine topics that interest and motivate the student beyond what many sterile language textbooks achieve. Literature is a creative product aimed at stimulating interest, so as a CBI subject it perhaps has the greatest potential to engage EFL students. Literature ranges from six-word memoirs, to comic books, to lengthy novels: it's creativity knows no bounds. As literature is a creative product, so too are the methods for using literature in language education. This forum mimics the theme of the conference : (Re) Imagining Language Education. How do you use literature to engage your students?

In this LiLT forum, we would like to address this topic. Presenters will share their experiences in how they use literature in their classroom.

Integral to the forum's success is audience participation; questions and insights will be solicited and greatly appreciated. Non-members and LiLT members alike are encouraged to attend and enrich our friendly and inclusive forum.

Teachers may find it challenging to get students to think about the texts that they read at a deeper level. In this presentation, an interpretive technique originally developed in the fields of narrative therapy and socio-narratology will be introduced. This technique asks readers to write letters of appreciation to writers, protagonists, or even to the texts themselves. In order to do this, readers must think carefully about what texts mean and how texts relate to their own values, experiences, and beliefs about themselves and the world around them. In their letters, readers are asked to be specific about what they appreciate, which requires them to reference the original text in their letters. The presenter will show how to adapt this technique for the EFL classroom. This will include ideas on how to introduce students to the genre of letters of appreciation and how to use the letters for discussion activities afterwards. Additionally, examples of student work will be shown.

Literature is a valuable educational resource, as it reflects universal issues that resonate across cultures and generations. However, in FLT, literary texts are still mainly utilised for presenting established interpretations and historical/social contextualisation of their content and for stylistic analysis, leading to a lack of engagement with the literary themes among students (see Teranishi, Saito, & Walsh, 2015). Instead, literature’s potential as motivating input for developing L2 communication skills through eliciting learner responses to and personal interpretations of the texts should be exploited (Fraser, 2018). In this session, methodological choices which challenge learner expectations of typical literature courses by providing opportunities for encouraging critical thinking, eliciting learner reactions, and enhancing productive linguistic skills are explored, with the aim of making literature more accessible and enjoyable to FL readers. Practical suggestions are then examined for incorporating literature into tertiary FLT, and are illustrated through teaching materials and resulting samples of L2 learners’ creative writing in response to the literary texts. The purpose is to offer ideas for teachers to experiment with employing literature in FL classes, in order to actively involve learners in the interpretation of literary input while developing their L2 productive skills through discussion and creative written output.