De mis pasos en la tierra: Language and Emotions in Displacement Contexts

Abstract

In this study, we start from the multisensory literary text as an activator of emotions and unique evocations, in order to enhance productive language skills in migrants from different backgrounds. For this activation, we based ourselves on Blumer's (1969) symbolic interactionism, according to which human experience is mediated by interpretation, since "human beings act on things according to the meaning they have for them". Following the reading by the participants, six women migrants to Spain, of an autobiographical text from the book De mis pasos en la tierra (1998) by Francisco Ayala about their lost Christmases, we have collected the testimonial texts that these displaced people have written evoking their longed-for celebrations. In the short term, our aim is to encourage the emergence of the whole range of singular referents to which the text may refer, in order to identify those recurrent representations that link imaginaries despite linguistic and cultural distance. In the long term, the aim is to vindicate the potential of the act of remembrance as a way of approaching language in a more meaningful way in the adult education classroom.