Hispania

Abstract:

This article demonstrates the pedagogical potential of two free digital tools: the mobile app Snapchat and Northwestern University Knight Lab's StoryMap. By combining Snapchat and StoryMap in the second language (L2) literature classroom, students adapt L2 language skills to twenty-first-century modes of communication, collaborate with peers, and creatively cross-disciplinary boundaries. Essential to this approach is the consideration of Snapchat (and image-based social media apps) as a twenty-first century literary genre (Bender 2020), and of mobile apps as interdisciplinary research objects (Morris and Murray 2018). From this point of departure, this essay offers a case study of a "medium-inflected DHL2" approach (Cro 2020) to a Spanish literature seminar. It demonstrates how non-traditional, DH-inflected assignments increase student engagement with literature by fostering creativity and productive language play in communicative and analytic contexts. At the curricular level, literature professors' essential role in second-language acquisition becomes visible and active, as DH tools bridge the "language/literature split" (Bernhardt 2001) in L2 pedagogy and curriculum design in higher education. A creative DHL2 approach that adopts an alternative view of traditional L2 literature content to generate non-traditional assessments will improve L2 literature pedagogy and make literary content relevant to students' personal and professional experiences