From plays to poetry, Le Petit Nicolas to the Association for Language Learning (ALL) Literature wiki, this book shows trainee teachers of MFL, teachers in schools, teacher educators, how literature can be an essential tool for developing students' cultural awareness as well as language skills.

With contributions from Ruth Heilbronn, Jane Jones and other leading scholars, it covers a wide range of approaches including looking at how to support students to develop the skills they need to read and discuss texts, and how to use stories as a pedagogic tool, rather than just a way to develop reading skills. Examples of teaching French, German, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish are used throughout, but the book draws together resources and strategies for use in teaching all modern foreign languages.

Supporting students to develop into creative, reflective teachers, this book offers support for readers to develop their own tasks for their pupils and questions throughout to keep them engaged and encouraging them to critically engage with the content. Seemingly daunting articles are made much more approachable for readers with windows on research which provide a summary of relevant research papers, with full reference details for follow up.

Fotini Diamantidaki is Lecturer at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, University College London, UK, where she researches and teaches on the Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) in Languages and supervises on the MA Pre-Service TESOL and Doctoral programmes.