The Role of Literature in ELT

Literature generally comes to identify a collection of texts. Most generally, a literature is equated with a collection of stories, poems, and plays that revolve around a particular topic. Literature has been generally used in English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom for the development of knowledge about language. In ELT, using literature has four advantages, to facilitate intelligence and sensibility training, to stimulate students’ creative and literary imagination, to improve students’ general cultural awareness, and to enhance the psycholinguistic aspect of language learning.

First advantage of literature in ELT is to facilitate intelligence and sensibility training. Through literature, students give the possibility to speak about science, even if they don’t work in this domain, or they can express their opinion about a political aspect, just because they have read something connected to that. Another opinion, Parkinson and Thomas (2000: 9-11) add that it provides a good model for good writing; it is memorable, non-trivial and challenging, and it also helps assimilate the rhythms of a language; therefore facilitating intelligence and sensibility training. When reading literary texts, the learners practice and develop their reading skills and strategies, which contribute to development of their fluency and proficiency.

Second advantage is to stimulate students’ creative and literary imagination and to develop their appreciation of literature. Literary texts contain multiple layers of meaning, which stimulates the learners’ imagination and promotes discussion in which they share their feelings and opinions. Literature offers students the possibility to enter the world of imagination and to leave apart the real one for a couple of hours. For example, students come to meet kings and queens, epoques many years ago, dream in the world of the rich or imagine how life will be in the future. It gives them the possibility to be another character in the story they read, to judge it from their perspective, to imagine the ending of it. Sometimes they identify themselves with the characters in the stories they read and the story can give them some clues to solve their problems and how to react in certain circumstances.

Third advantage is to improve students’ general cultural awareness. Literature helps students understand and make sense of the world around them. Through literature, they explore the human condition and analyze how and why people think the way they think and feel the way they feel. Literature enables students to develop their minds analytically and promotes open minds. Students see the world through the eyes different writes from different cultures and in turn learn the ways to deal with things happening around them. Without literature, we lack insight and understanding of human nature. Moreover, literature holds high status in many cultures and countries. Therefore students can feel real sense of achievement at understanding a piece of highly respected literature. Literature educates the whole learner's personality since it includes a lot of cross-curricular and cross-cultural relations. Through literature teachers may not only develop the learners' attitudes to reading and learning languages but they may also cultivate learners' attitudes to values. According to Duff and Maley, “Though different cultural backgrounds reflected in literary texts may cause some difficulties in reading and general comprehension, it is suggested to overcome this problem by exploring foreign cultures rather than to avoid using literature” (1990:7).

Fourth advantage is to enhance the psycholinguistic aspect of language learning as it focuses on form and discourse processing skills and improves vocabulary expansion and reading skills. Hedge said, “Literary texts can develop the student’s knowledge of language at the levels of vocabulary and structure and at the level of textual organization” (1985:22). For example, when reading, learners have opportunity to recycle and fix the vocabulary already learnt and meet new expressions. In addition, according to Hall, he said that literature has experienced a revival with the advent of communicative approach in language teaching as it provides learners with authentic, pleasurable and cultural material (2005:47-57).

To conclude, using literature in English Language Teaching has beneficial to facilitate intelligence and sensibility training, to stimulate students’ creative and literary imagination, to improve students’ general cultural awareness, and to enhance the psycholinguistic aspect of language learning. Literature may provide the appropriate way of stimulating the acquisition and learning of languages by providing meaningful and memorable contexts for processing and interpreting new language. Reading literature, however, also increases learners’ awareness of language use since literary texts present language in discourse set in different social contexts. So, teachers can use literature in their teaching to reach those advantages for their students.

Works Cited:

Duff and Alan Maley. 1990. Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hall, G. 2005. Literature in Language Education. New York: Palgrave.

Hedge, Tricia. 1985. Using Readers in English Teaching. London: Macmillan.

Parkinson, B., and H. Reid Thomas. 2000. Teaching Literature in a Second Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.