Learning through literature

Both language and content are involved in all holistic, content-based approaches to language education with young learners. This chapter argues that waiting until children are old enough to study adult literature creates a delay in their affective, cognitive and literacy development that may be difficult to reverse. The formats and characteristics of children’s literature are presented, including multimodal texts such as picturebooks, graphic novels and story apps that support multisensory learning of integrated language and content. Children’s literature can support learners in tolerance of ambiguity, in the development of rich lexical representations of language, in implicit learning of formulaic sequences and in recognizing language patterning, for example, through poetry and oral storytelling. Learning through literature can also stimulate and promote creative writing in English. Thus literature in English language education offers a valuable study in multiple ways – for the acquisition of intercultural understanding, literary literacy and critical literacy, aesthetic pleasure, visual literacy, windows on other worlds and, an important skill in an increasingly rapid world, deep reading.