LITERATURE IN A SECOND LANGUAGE CLASSROOMLiterature plays an important role in the process of foreign-language teaching. It stimulates students to establish and clarify their own values, pushes them to new action, and provides them with sensory and emotional experiences. The use of reading for personal insight and growth was even given a name: "bibliotherapy" (Ransom, 1978). Teachers can promote this process in the important small group discussions that follow listening and reading activities, and by warmly encouraging personal reactions and identification with the characters. While considering the use of literature in a second language classroom, it is worth noticing same basic characteristics that make it advisable for use. (Silberstein, 1994) - Universality: Literature is universal in human cultures.
- Nontriviality: Unlike some expository prose, literary texts often address fundamental issues of the human condition.
- Motivation: The individual responses engendered by literary texts can prove motivating in the language classroom as can the pleasure and variety afforded by these texts.
Moreover, literature can be used to teach the following elements of a second language: - Cultural information: These texts are particularly suited to teaching elements of the culture that produced them.
- Syntactic markers/discourse structure: Poetry, in particular, can be an effective vehicle for highlighting these aspects of English.
- Teaching language rhythm: These written texts can be used to develop a feeling for the rhythm of oral and written English.
Collie and Slater (1987) give some more arguments for the use of literature in the foreign-language classroom. Language learners need to deepen their understanding of life in the country where that language is spoken. In the classroom environment they can gain such understanding with the aid of literary works. The 'world' of a novel, play, or short story offers a full and vivid context in which characters from many social backgrounds can be depicted. A reader discovers their thoughts, feelings, customs, possessions; what they buy, believe in, fear, enjoy; how they speak and behave behind closed doors. This vivid imagined world can quickly give the foreign reader a feel for the codes and preoccupations that structure a real society. Literature is perhaps best seen as a complement to other materials used to increase the foreign learner's insight into the country whose language is being learnt. Literature also aids language enrichment. It provides a rich context in which individual lexical or syntactical items are made more memorable. Reading a substantial and contextualised body of text, students gain familiarity with many features of the written language - the formation and function of sentences, the variety of possible structures, the different ways of connecting ideas - which broaden and enrich their own writing skills. Moreover, extensive reading increases a learner's receptive vocabulary and facilitates transfer to a more active form of knowledge. This kind of reading, required in tackling a novel or long play develops the student's ability to make inferences from linguistic clues, and to deduce meaning from context, both useful tools in reading other sorts of material as well. A literary text can also serve as an excellent prompt for oral work. Moreover, literature helps extend the intermediate or advanced learner's awareness of the range of language itself. Literary language is not typical of the language of daily life, but it is special in its way. It is heightened: sometimes elaborate, sometimes marvellously simple. The compressed quality of much literary language produces unexpected density of meaning. Figurative language joins levels of experience that were previously distinct, casting new light on familiar sensations and opening up new dimensions of perception in a way that can be exhilarating but also startling and even unsettling. Literature can be helpful in the language learning process because of the personal involvement it fosters in readers. Engaging imaginatively with literature enables learners to shift the focus of their attention beyond the more mechanical aspects of the foreign language system. When a novel, play or short story is explored over a period of time, the result is that the reader begins to 'inhabit' the text. Pursuing the development of the story becomes more important than pinpointing what individual words or phrases mean. The reader is eager to find out what happens as events unfold; he or she feels close to certain characters and shares their emotional responses. Marckwardt (1981) considers some factors that influence the choice of literature to be taught in the English classroom. He presents two basic principles as for choosing reading material itself; then he proposes what should be taught at various levels. Next, he considers how literature should be taught. First, at the initial stages of reading literature and for some time thereafter, the literature that is read should be contemporary, written in the modern idiom, i.e. literature which poses no linguistic difficulties for the pupil because of the time lag. Second, literature written in as many of the English-speaking countries as possible should be included. For children at primary-school level there could be an almost immediate introduction to literature, interpreting this term as language creation which is not utilitarian, language that is sheer fun, that at one and the same time feeds the interest in narrative and the concern for the miraculous. Children's literature, as defined by Barker (1985), implies qualities of literary creation, such as musicality, sensory images, beautiful words, subtle descriptions, all expressed in language that is out of ordinary. This literature speaks not only of what is beautiful but also of intrigue, tension, and fear; of social-consciousness issues and of the nobility or morality of its characters; of the horrible, the painful, and the undesirable. To enter the world of children's literature, one must enter the world of song, play, and dance; the world of bright-coloured books with beautiful illustrations full of surprising, mysterious, and fantastic elements of everyday life. Basically children's literature encompasses narratives like fables and myths, fairy tales and stories; plays, poetry, and traditional literature such as riddles, rhymes, sayings, etc. The narratives that appeal the most to children are fairy tales. They have a great cultural value not only for their artistic perfection and simplicity but also for universal truths they embody, the same truths that have a positive impact on the emotional development of children. At a secondary school level books and stories can constitute the material for reading, serving an important purpose to stimulate an interest in reading for its own sake, to demonstrate that school English is more than lessons in grammar and drill on vocabulary. The senior high school would seem to be the proper time to introduce literature in the somewhat more narrowly conceived sense of belles-lettres. Students can read short stories and drama. At the final pre-collegiate stage some time can be devoted to poetry - poetry that is at once comprehensible and not esoteric in content. Much of Masefield and Frost will fit into this category. Then the question of how literature should be taught is attempted. The following statement sums up what seems to be an ideal approach for the teacher of literature with respect to the work under consideration and the activities of the classroom: "Students are invited by some teachers to say how they as individuals respond to the work, what it says to them and about their lives; what it tells them about human beings and human life in general". In conclusion, literature offers foreign-language learners powerful potential, and, thus its role must not be underestimated by teachers. Above all, "it can provide a key to motivating students to read in English... for all students literature is an ideal vehicle for illustrating language use and for introducing cultural assumptions" (Barker, 1985). Moreover, literature can stimulate students' own creation of imaginative works. And last, but not least, it can enrich the process of learning at the level of the learner's personality, since it can add a new dimension to life and create a new awareness, a greater sensitivity to people and surroundings. Literature can educate both the heart and the head. "The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide!" | | | (Huck, 1979) |
BIBLIOGRAPHY- Barker, M. E. (1985) "Using Children's Literature to Teach ESL to Young Learners", in Selected Articles from the English Teaching Forum 1984-1988, 113-118.
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- Collie, J. & S. Slater (1987) Literature in the Language Classroom, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
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- Huck, C. S. (1979) "No Wider than the Heart Is Wide", in Shapiro, J. E. (ed.) 26-36.
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- Marckwardt, A. H. (1981) "What Literature to Teach: Principles of Selection and Class Treatment", in Selected Articles from the English Teaching Forum
- 1979-1983,
315-320.-
- Ransom, G. A. (1978) Preparing to Teach Reading, Little, Brown and Company, Boston.
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- Silberstein, S. (1994) Techniques and Resources in Teaching Reading, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
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