Literature, challenge and mediation in 21st century language learning

New directions in language learning and teaching are evident today. Students bring transnational, multicultural, multilingual, and digitally mediated experiences and identities into classrooms still sometimes too much modelled on outdated one-language-one-culture-one nation ideologies. Literature’s value in these new circumstances is to challenge readers to independent interpretations, learning, and creativity, with refreshed understandings of what language, culture or indeed literature might be. In this paper I review some relevant recent interventions into the foreign language education field, including a reference to the Council of Europe’s (2018) Companion. I then give a brief example from my own use of a literary text in China.