Literature as an "affective magnet": defining, engaging and investigating emotions in a (Russian) language-literature classroom

The purpose of this article is to conceptualize affective processes in reading literature in a foreign language. While generations of scholars and methodologists have stressed the educational potential of literary texts in terms of engaging learners’ emotions, the field has a relatively poor research base for discussing what these reading-induced emotions are and how to systematically promote them in a language-literature classroom. To this end, the current study first conceptualizes the different types of emotions that are arguably involved in reading literature in a foreign language and then formulates a set of pedagogical principles to foster their emergence in a language-literature classroom. The article then describes and presents the results of a real-life class session that was developed following these principles and held among volunteer Russian language students at an Australian university. The final part of the article describes the implications of the study both for classroom development and research data collection. In this last respect, the article advances a bilingual Questionnaire of Emotions in Foreign-Language Literary Reading that can serve both data collection and classroom development purposes.