Literary Pragmatics and Intercultural Dialogue in the Beginning Language Class: A Study in Social Reading

This chapter explores the potential of literary pragmatic reading in intercultural learning. The focus is a small-scale study conducted in two, second-semester German as a second language classes taught at a large public university in the American Southwest. Through digital social reading, students read, responded to, and discussed a poem that parodies anti-immigrant discourse around cultural differences. The study draws from learner data generated during these online discussions and the observations of the researchers during class, in order to demonstrate how literary pragmatic ways of reading created a space in which the students were able to reflect on the sociopragmatic choices represented in the poem and how those positioned the figures in the poem in particular ways. In dialogue with and around the literary texts, they were also able to explore assumptions - their own and others - about the relationships between power, pragmatics, and different intercultural experiences in a way that expanded the apolitical depictions of cultural diversity found in many language and culture textbooks.