Second Language Learner’s Emotional Reading:

The Didactic Potential of Written Retelling in Literature Education

Abstract

The aim of this article is to research students’ character emotional inferences (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994) from a literary text based on their written summaries of chapters from the novel Stjärnlösa Nätter (Starless Nights) by Arkan Asaad (2015). The study was conducted within the Swedish as a second language instruction in the individual program Language introduction in secondary school in Sweden with two participating teachers and thirteen students aged 16-20. In accordance with the analysis many students retold the main character’s emotions: hatred and love in relation to their father, anger over discrepancies between generations and cultures and loneliness in not belonging to or understanding a culture. Based on the results, the authors of the article suggest that written retelling could be used in literature education to gain insights into students’ understanding of the main character’s emotions as well as their own, as part of the work on democracy and identity development. The conclusion is that this didactic potential should be utilized in the teaching of literature.