What is Aesthetic Reading

Literacy as well as literary education increasingly play an essential role in English as a foreign language pedagogy. This chapter seeks to establish a relationship between the development of literacy and narrative empathy with primary students in the English as a foreign language classroom. After designing a didactic sequence based on picture books and other multimodal resources and then implementing it in a fourth-grade class, the authors qualitatively assessed students' ability to describe and identify in English the feelings and motivations of literary characters. The findings reveal that primary students reflect upon the narrative and affective situations encountered in the stories they read and were able to engage in a process of meaning-making in English.