MULTILITERACIES IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM: LITERATURE CIRCLES, CREATIVE WRITING, AND LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGIES IN AN INDONESIAN LANGUAGE CLASS

Abstract

Twenty-first-century language education aims to develop competencies such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity, and the pedagogy of multiliteracies offers a principled way of pursuing them: it treats reading and writing as active, multimodal meaning-making rather than as the reception of fixed content. Much less is known, however, about how secondary students perceive multiliteracies-based literary activities, particularly in international-school settings where Indonesian is learned as a second or additional language, and about whether they associate such activities with the strategy use and autonomy the framework is intended to promote. To address this gap, the study examined the perceptions and responses of 18 students in the Grade 11 Indonesian B class at Singapore School, Pantai Indah Kapuk, toward two multiliteracies activities, literature circles and creative written assignments, using an adapted Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) and semi-structured interviews; questionnaire responses were examined for patterns across the six SILL strategy categories and interview data were coded thematically. Students reported drawing on cognitive, metacognitive, affective, and social strategies as they worked with literary texts, and they associated the two activities with more deliberate reading, greater independence in preparation, and richer collaborative discussion, while also reporting difficulty in articulating their ideas and in interpreting Indonesian texts. These findings indicate that multiliteracies-based literary activities can support learner autonomy and selected twenty-first-century competencies in a second-language classroom when the activities are adequately scaffolded, and they suggest a more deliberate role for creative writing as well as the value of pairing students’ perceptions with longer-term evidence of their reading and writing.