Expressing a Personal Response to a Creative Text in the ‘Maltese as a Foreign Language’ Class

This article discusses the implementation of the Common European Framework of Reference’s (CEFR) set of descriptors relating to ‘personal response to creative texts’ in the teaching of Maltese as a Foreign Language (MFL). The new volume of the CEFR’s Companion Volume, published in 2018, included a number of new descriptors, among which are those related to learners’ response to creative texts. As an initial application of this new set of descriptors to MFL, we created an intermedial video production involving poetry, music and dance, that brings to the fore issues of migration. The video stimulates a reflection on humanity's collective history, and suggests the idea that we all are descendants of people who came from the sea. In addition to the highly motivational aspect of the task, it has helped us estimate the difficulty of such a task in the context of MFL. We also obtained some insight into the application of the relevant descriptors for this part of the MFL syllabus.