ShorTelling: From Fiction to Screen. Intersemiotic Translation and Multimodal Pragmatics in English Language Teaching

Abstract This paper examines a pedagogical framework that integrates pragmatics and multimodality to guide English language learners in translating literary texts into audiovisual productions. Extending earlier work on visual-to-verbal creative writing, it reverses the process, moving from written narratives to screen works through treatments, scripts and short films. These outputs involve creative recontextualisation, including modernisation and rewriting, rather than direct adaptation. The approach combines Task-Based Language Teaching, Project-Based Learning and experiential learning to foster linguistic and pragmatic awareness through multimodal production, with explicit comparison between writing for literature and for cinema. The study investigates learners’ pragmatic strategies, including speech acts (Austin 1962; Searle 1969), deixis, politeness, implicatures (Grice 1975) and presupposition, and their translation into non-verbal resources such as gesture, gaze, sound design and visual framing. Drawing on Jakobson’s (1959) intersemiotic translation and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2001, 2006) multimodal discourse and visual grammar, and informed by Leech and Short (1981) and Stockwell (2020), the analysis shows how learners coordinate semiotic channels to encode pragmatic force and reinterpret stylistic effects. Findings indicate that adapting literary narratives into audiovisual formats compels learners to reframe pragmatic functions multimodally, strengthening language skills, metapragmatic awareness, textual sensitivity and semiotic agility in second language production.