Literary Awareness in a High-School EFL Learning Environment: An Empirical Evaluation

This chapter discusses the teaching of literary awareness to high-school students of English as a foreign language (EFL). Dedicated to the topic of iconicity, the proposed pedagogical experience stimulates students to work out the connection between visual and linguistic representations, identify such links in a variety of texts, create their own concrete poems, and justify their stylistic choices. Three sources of data are used: (i) questionnaires detailing participants’ profiles, (ii) students’ answers and creative writing, and (iii) unit evaluation questionnaires. The data obtained enabled an evidence-based evaluation of the workshop from the participants’ viewpoint. We argue that evaluating students’ learning empirically should be part and parcel of any pedagogical experience.