Electronic Literature: An Innovative Resource to Foster Reading Motivation in Secondary Education

Abstract

Reading has traditionally been considered in the secondary school curriculum within the English subject in Spain in a way that hardly ever achieves students’ attention if they are not naturally predisposed to it because of their tastes. It is one of the four skills (together with writing, speaking and listening) that teachers include in their exams, taking the shape of a short text with test or short questions to answer. However, this adapted reading, even though easier, is often not depicting real literature and it may not be helpful for students to actually learn through reading. This project aims at exploring electronic literature as a resource to increase students’ motivation towards this skill. A secondary goal will be that they learn to cope with nongraded literature. In order to achieve both objectives, new technologies present interactivity as their strongest point since this factor usually results appealing for secondary students, and at the same time , traditional reading can be reinvented by adding extra elements (e.g. videos or sound). By these means, students are expected to understand the context without having to always resort to a dictionary while they are provided with a multimodal experience. This study will develop the issue by firstly providing an introduction and a theoretical review that provides an account of the evolution from reading on paper (i.e. a book) to reading on screen (i.e. digital books) and reading multimodal (i.e. electronic books). It will also deep into the most direct positive affective factor associated, that is motivation. After those sections, the elements that an electronic book can make use of will be explained and four samples from renowned literary works will be analysed through a multimodal point of view. Once the options for materials have been considered, a teaching proposal will be developed introducing electronic literature into the English classroom together with expected results that could arise if it was implemented. The proposal will not only take reading into account, but also writing and digital skills will play an important role. Finally, some conclusions and suggestions for further research will guide the path for future investigations on this topic.