Using fantasy Literature in the ESL Classroom: an Educational Intervention Proposal in the Digital Era

Abstract

This masters dissertation aims to present a didactic proposal of intervention based on the introduction of literary-based WebQuests in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom as a way to deal with the increasing influence of digital technology on our students. The motivation behind this idea is a purely personal one, as I came up with it during a period of supervised practice teaching in a secondary education center: during one of the sessions, I tried to explain the basics of direct/indirect speech by asking the students if they read books. The answer was that only 10% of the class did, and those not frequently. Later, as I was searching for a solution to this situation, my brother told me that his new videogame had features of gothic fiction. How could a young boy, who had never read those books, know about the existence of that specific literary genre? His answer was that he had been looking for the location of an important object from the game when he, navigating through different websites, found an article in which the designer confessed that the videogame was based on gothic stories. This led me to the belief that literature and Information and Communication Technologies (henceforward ICTs) could be combined in order to create learning materials that motivated the students to learn English and enjoy its literature and culture in a digital environment.