La poesía digital en el marco de la intermedialidad para la enseñanza y el aprendizaje del español como LE/L2

Abstract

Summary This PhD thesis aims to exploit the aesthetic theory of intermediality in the field of teaching Spanish as a foreign language (SFL). In order to accomplish this objective, we introduce in the SFL classroom the yet to be explored genre of digital poetry. The reason for including this genre in the SFL classroom is that it emerged along with digital technologies and, in its genesis, there are obvious literary implications. Therefore, we consider that this genre can promote new confluences of competencies such as multiliteracies, literary and communicative competences, that are not usually combined in the language classroom. Moreover, digital poetry is a genre that presents a great number of intermedial connections in its works. Intermediality defines the relationships between the media involved in the production of cultural creations when the borders of the media itself are no longer visible (Rajewsky, 2005). This idea is crucial in education, as it makes the materiality of cultural products more present in the language classroom and allows learners to go beyond the text. Intermediality, in turn, is closely related to other phenomena that characterize our time, like the culture of convergence (Jenkins, 2006) or the theory of digital natives (Prensky, 2001), among others. These theories lead educators to teach "the old with new eyes" (Piscitelli, 2008), since the textual landscape is constantly changing, and the processes of reading and writing likewise. Therefore, it is of great importance that teaching takes into account new literacies, without privileging any mode of representation. Thereby, this research pursues to develop different teaching proposals in the SFL classroom that revolve around digital poetry and the intermediality present in this genre. In the same way, these proposals will be based on certain additional principles: the theory of multiliteracies, the overcoming of the division between language and content and, finally, the genre-based approach, developed particularly by the German department of the University Georgetown (see Warren and Winkler, 2016). There is no unambiguous way to define digital poetry. It is rather a conglomerate of forms that contains very heterogeneous elements in its structure. In summary, a poem can be understood as a digital product if there are different computer programs or processes in its composition, generation or presentation (Funkhouser, 2007). The implications in language teaching are that digital poetry is based on the idea of the reconceptualization of the text through the digital medium. This change can offer a new pedagogical framework for an environment of linguistic and artistic experimentation that offers the students the possibility of establishing new intermedial relationships between the components of texts. In short, our doctoral research offers five lesson plans that present digital poetry as the central axis. These plans allow educators to exploit this genre in the SFL classroom with the aim of achieving further development of multiliteracies, as well as serve the attainment of communicative and literary competences in the complex process of language teaching and learning. Resumen