Title: La littérature luxembourgeoise à l’école : une didactique interculturelle de la littérature en contexte multilingue
Author, co-author: Thiltges, Sébastian; Raus, Tonia
Abstract: In Luxembourg, multilingual requirements are a corollary of the country’s historical trilingualism and characterize its school system: Luxembourgish is the national language, French and German the official languages. Like other European countries, English tends to occupy an increasingly important place, as a language taught in secondary school, while Luxembourgish plays only a minor role as a school subject. Rooted in the traditional association of language and literature, Luxembourg’s school environment is still largely organized according to a juxtaposed multilingualism, with clear linguistic separations and specific disciplinary cultures. These characteristics considerably hinder, among others, the entry of works from the Luxembourg literary field into the curricular path of secondary education. In fact, Luxembourgish literature, an essentially multilingual (Luxembourgish, French, German and more recently English, Italian, Portuguese) and small literature, is hardly taught in schools: the national literature struggles to impose itself compared to the cultural references of the large neighboring countries. At the same time, the weak literary production intended for adolescent readers, which translates socio-literarily into the absence of specific editorial collections, finds only a slight echo with its recipients. Starting from this double literary and didactic context, we wish to present our project to publish a novel by a French-language Luxembourg author in a digital format, thus remediatizing the texts, and broadening them with educational content and activities. The development of these new media considers the multilingual and intercultural particularities of Luxembourg’s literary and school environments and targets a readership fond of new reading practices. By adopting a research-action approach, we’d like to cover multiple research areas (multilingual children's literature in a small literary field, digital reading practices, teaching of literary reading in a multilingual school context) and we could integrate the project in our teaching in the Master in Secondary Education to train future teachers.
Author, co-author: Thiltges, Sébastian; Raus, Tonia
Abstract: In Luxembourg, multilingual requirements are a corollary of the country’s historical trilingualism and characterize its school system: Luxembourgish is the national language, French and German the official languages. Like other European countries, English tends to occupy an increasingly important place, as a language taught in secondary school, while Luxembourgish plays only a minor role as a school subject. Rooted in the traditional association of language and literature, Luxembourg’s school environment is still largely organized according to a juxtaposed multilingualism, with clear linguistic separations and specific disciplinary cultures. These characteristics considerably hinder, among others, the entry of works from the Luxembourg literary field into the curricular path of secondary education. In fact, Luxembourgish literature, an essentially multilingual (Luxembourgish, French, German and more recently English, Italian, Portuguese) and small literature, is hardly taught in schools: the national literature struggles to impose itself compared to the cultural references of the large neighboring countries. At the same time, the weak literary production intended for adolescent readers, which translates socio-literarily into the absence of specific editorial collections, finds only a slight echo with its recipients. Starting from this double literary and didactic context, we wish to present our project to publish a novel by a French-language Luxembourg author in a digital format, thus remediatizing the texts, and broadening them with educational content and activities. The development of these new media considers the multilingual and intercultural particularities of Luxembourg’s literary and school environments and targets a readership fond of new reading practices. By adopting a research-action approach, we’d like to cover multiple research areas (multilingual children's literature in a small literary field, digital reading practices, teaching of literary reading in a multilingual school context) and we could integrate the project in our teaching in the Master in Secondary Education to train future teachers.