Innovation in Language Learning

Over the past few decades, both teachers and researchers in the field of language learning seem to have firmly established the positive role of literature as a source of authentic material, motivating factor and a significant contribution to raising students’ cultural awareness for the English Language Classroom (Parkinson & Reid Thomas, 2000; Hall, 2005; Carter & Stockwell, 2008). It has also been stressed that the positive effect of this approach is necessarily connected with sensible and methodologically correct application “of relevant and appealing material [...] through the use of activities that promote involvement, reader response and a solid integration between language and literature” (Banu 2012).

Heralding the transformation of the “linearity of the traditional text” (Barthes, 1977; Derrida, 1978) into an open interactive system that supports visual and auditory stimuli and “non-linear models of learning” (Robberecht, 2007), the ever-increasing role of ICT in language learning introduces the need for new pedagogical approaches to literary texts that accentuate active, individualised and motivating ways of interaction with and navigation through literary texts, and dramatically change its role in the English Language Classroom. ICT thus offers alternative methodological approaches to the role literature in ELT, in particular to language teachers who in many cases still feel “that they are not equipped methodologically to use literary texts” (Paran, 1998). In this way, ICT helps teachers to overcome some of the typical problems connected with the integration of literature into the ELT class, such as weak comprehension, lack of interest and confidence” (Ghazali, Setia, Muthusamy, Jusoff, 2009).

In an attempt to establish an easily accessible methodology that would allow the participants of language teacher training programme at the Masaryk Institute of Advanced Studies in Prague to effectively combine the skills acquired in their ICT and English literature methodology courses, the paper critically assesses the rationale behind using ICT in the literature-based language class and examines the possible interaction of these effective, but not self-evidently compatible and unproblematic pedagogical tools. In doing so, the research explores recent methodological approaches that bring together literature and ICT tools (such as mobile phones, tablets, videos, presentations, hypertext, blog or electronic fiction), and points out both theoretical and practical problems that arise from their use in the English Language Classroom.