Methodology

It is now the moment to give an account of the methodology that is being followed in the teaching approach developed in this project.

In order to achieve the aims and objectives that were previously defined, historical, cultural and social contents were explored in foreign language classes. As it was said before, in this didactic approach the arts play an important role in the learning process since they are a means used in the expansion of the students' cultural knowledge and in the development of their critical consciousness. We do not claim that the use of art (literature, painting, sculpture, music, etc.) in foreign language classes is an absolutely new idea. Interesting suggestions and examples may be found in several essays and textbooks - cf. Cranmer, 1995; Collie and Ladousse, 1991; Paula, Sousa and Lourinho, 1995. However, in this project literary texts, reproductions of paintings and art photos and music are explored in class with three main purposes: to enhance the students' ability to think critically about the problems of our time, to expand their cultural knowledge and to promote their aesthetic sensitivity.

As far as the methodological background is concerned, our didactic approach hinges on the language teaching method know as task-based learning (cf. Nunan, 1989; Skehan, 1996). As a learncenteredred, communicative approach, it is best suited to achieve the aims that were previously advanced. Students are expected to play an active role in the process and are encouraged to explore, analyse and to find the solutions to the problems (both linguistic and social problems) that they are faced with. Furthermore, the concept of task brings the sense of purpose to the learning sequence. When students produce posters or leaflets, write a letter to a given institution, start a blog on the Internet or a wall newspaper at school, they are building up the idea that they can play an active part in society and that their initiative is a contribution to change the world. As an example, a task may consist of writing a letter to UNICEF, reporting the existence of famine in a specific region of the planet and asking this organisation to take measures in order to fight the problem.

One of the difficulties that teachers have been trying to tackle for the past decades is motivation. Every teacher has searched for the best strategies and activities to captivate the interest of his/her students. We advocate the use of art in language classes because well-selected literary texts and reproductions of paintings, sculptures or art photos may have a strong motivating effect among students. Experience has taught us that a painting such as Salvador Dali­'s The Persistence of Memory, with its mysterious, enigmatic and even bizarre features, is more challenging and thought-provoking than any common photo of a mall, a posh house or a sports car that we find in magazines or in advertisement. In class, the latter are bonfires that extinguish rather quickly. Furthermore, art certainly has a wider educational value.

Thus, in this teaching approach we were able to articulate contents of Education for Citizenship and the arts at the service of foreign language learning. When students are interpreting works of art and discussing social issues, they are also developing their language skills and expanding their knowledge of the structure of the idiom. It is now time to explain how our approach was put into practice at different stages of the learning sequence and to present concrete examples of activities that have been carried out in English, German and Portuguese classes.

As it was said before, literature, visual art and music perform a central function in different activities of the language classes. Still, the teachers involved in the project must be very selective when choosing the appropriate teaching materials, which have to be both motivating and thought-provoking in order to challenge students to respond to them, that is, to analyse and provide interpretations to poems, paintings, sculptures (etc.) as well as to establish associations between them and the world we live in. On the other hand, such materials must be appropriate to the level of the students in question.

Carefully selected poems and excerpts from fiction and drama were used in reading-comprehension activities, for they explore a wider range of registers and meanings as well as a wide variety of contemporary issues. For instance, William Blake's "The chimney sweeper" was analysed in an English class about working conditions; and, to give an example of an activity of a class of Portuguese for foreign students, Sophia de Mello Breyner's poem "Porque" ("Because") was integrated in a learning sequence on social injustice. However, this does not mean that non-literary texts are excluded from the approach that we are describing; in fact, informative texts, newspaper and magazine articles, advertisement texts, letters, dialogues (etc.) were a regular presence in class. But literary texts were often used as a way to help students develop their ability to understand what they read and as a way to introduce discussions on citizenship issues. The authors of the project produced a tape with readings of poems in English, German and Portuguese studied in class, so that it could be used in listening-comprehension activities. Poems by Maya Angelou, Auden, Langston Hughes, Derek Mahon, Brecht, Dehmel, Heine, António Gedeão, Régio and Torga were included in this tape.
Then, musical pieces were played in class in lead-in activities in order to introduce the theme of the learning sequence or as a starting point to a writing activity. In cases when music is accompanied by a text, it was used in a listening-comprehension activity. Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Benjamin Britten's opera The Little Sweep served this purpose beautifully in English classes, whereas, to give an example of popular culture in class, Rammstein's song "Ich will" was explored with the same purpose in German classes.
On the other hand, reproductions of paintings, sculptures and photos were used at different moments of language lessons. In pre-reading activities, both the vocabulary and the main issues of a text were introduced with the help of a painting, which was afterwards analysed and interpreted: as an example, Picasso's Guernica was used to introduce vocabulary related to war and its dramatic consequences. It goes without saying that works of visual arts were explored at different stages of a learning sequence as a starting point for students' oral practice, whether as class work, group work or pair work. For example, in an English class, the students gathered in pairs to interpret Jacob Epstein's The Rock Drill with the help of a questions advanced by the teacher. Afterwards, they discussed possible interpretations of the sculpture in class work.
Reproductions of paintings, sculptures and art photos were also explored in the less-controlled practice of a grammar structure that was previously taught and drilled, in order to consolidate that knowledge. Finally, works of visual art were used as a starting point to write narrative, descriptive and argumentative texts. Thus, students produced interesting texts about issues like racism, social injustice, the power of the media, based on paintings, sculptures and photos. Nam June Paik's Buddha TV inspired the students to write about the impact of the media on contemporary life.
Teachers will realize that it is not always easy to find the image they want in art books. Nevertheless, the Internet is a rich database with good reproductions of paintings or photos. It is neither difficult nor illegal to print the intended image on a transparency in order to show it in class or to record it in a disk and use a datashow to display it.