Students’ Responses to Literature within Multiliteracies Pedagogy

This paper aims to analyze how situated practice in the multiliteracies pedagogy might help students respond to the literature utilizing a reader-response approach. The participants are the 2nd-semester students of the English Education Study Program in UMSIDA who had attended the course of Linguistic and Literature for one semester. In collecting the data, the researcher used Google Meet to invite the students into a forum discussion. Firstly, learning begins with exploring students’ knowledge. Then, the teacher gave some statements to recall their life experiences, thoughts and opinions related to a particular topic. The topic addressed was about the students’ beliefs and assumptions upon a particular sociocultural issue. Further, in that situated practice, they can give various responses to the theme of the New Boy film. From their responses, the interpretation helped them to connect to the social context, so they may comprehend the story’s values. The outcomes showed that students' prior knowledge and reader-response approach work quite well altogether in enhancing students’ interpretation of a particular literary work. Learning materials with closer relevancy to students’ experiences may also be helpful for students in contextualizing the issues on a certain literature work upon their daily real-life circumstances, which in turn will be useful for students’ language learning in advance.