“CLIL and Literary Education: Teaching Foreign Languages and Literature from an Intercultural Perspective. The Results of a Case Study”

This article intends to explore the relationship between CLIL and literary education by considering the results of a case study involving the teaching of foreign literatures from an intercultural perspective in Italian secondary schools. In the first part we introduce a model of literary and intercultural communicative competence and in the second part we present a case study implemented in three secondary schools in Northern Italy. A qualitative research design was implemented and data were collected through interviews with teachers and questionnaires answered by students. The results revealed that while teachers focus on the intercultural dimension of literature only in terms of the expansion of the literary canon, students appreciate this dimension when it involves interpreting the texts through debates with their peers.