This paper presents a study of a game design that legitimizes the students in the second language classroom to act as characters in the classical novel Herr Arnes Penningar by Selma Lagerlöf by descending in the story in the form of a digital avatar (Coleman 2011). The aim is to find new ways of developing reading and writing skills and abilities (Gee & Hayes 2011; Krashen 1991) and to provoke a desire for reading fictional text (Rosenblatt 2003; Ryan 2006; Felski 2008). The method is design-based-research (Barab & Squire 2015) meaning that the design is created in collaboration with teachers, tested in the classroom and that adjustments are made in order to develop the design.

Tentative findings from the pilot study made in 2016 with 24 students in secondary school shows a reciprocal process that emerges through performance by the avatar, where imaginative reading is reimagined through creative writing in which the reading and the writing process sustain and nourish each other. The study of this paper will be conducted in February 2018 with Swedish as second language students in their second year in upper secondary school. The students will take part of game design using an avatar, doing quests and getting experience points according to the curriculum standards. In focus in this paper is the avatar. Is the avatar subsidising the literature reading? In what ways does the avatar contributes to the use of literature in the second language classroom? The material is interviews with the students and the texts the students write through their avatar.