Why should we use literature in the English Language Teaching classroom? (I)

Globally speaking, education in English Language Teaching is usually designed by applied linguists with a focus on language alone, and it may have little knowledge of literature or the educational requirements of school settings. Nowadays, many reading experts recognize that some students leave school knowing how to read, but without knowing that reading can be a pleasant activity. According to the educator Jim Trelease (1989), “we are creating school time readers rather than life time readers.” (p. 12). This is because many of these secondary-school students do not connect to texts. Since they do not attach to these texts, they present negative attitudes towards reading. As the psycholinguist Frank Smith (1988) explains, “one of the great tragedies of contemporary education is not so much that many students leave school unable to read and to write, but that others graduate with an antipathy to reading … despite the abilities they might have.” (p. 177). Therefore, a critical question emerges: Why are there more and more secondary-school students who take little care for reading?

Unfortunately, what Smith referred to as “great tragedies of contemporary education” (p. 177) has to deal with a group of people who can read but do not share this “reading” feeling. Many people point out that this may happen due to external reasons such as insignificant parental modelling or too much television or computer hours, but there are other certain beliefs that are still prevalent in many English Language Teaching classrooms: 

The most significant ones which are never overlooked are the great emphasis on the idea that students must find the correct interpretation of books because they have clear boundaries, the thought that students should discover the author’s intentions at all times and the fact that students have to memorize the whole book in order to pass the subject, instead of giving them the chance to read for pleasure. What I mean by this is that these students are supposed to come up with abilities in order to comment the same that the teacher thinks about the novel or book carried out in class, that they also have to know what the author expected to say when s/he wrote, for instance, a specific paragraph, and that they have to study every word and passage from the book by heart, since they will have a test which will be made of lots of ambiguous questions and unmotivated inquiries which will have to be “properly” answered, according to the teacher in charge.

Furthermore, many of these books which are established at the beginning of each course are usually adaptations of renowned English works such as Hamlet (1603), by Shakespeare, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), by Jonathan Swift or Murder on the Orient Express (1934), by Agatha Christie, among others. By using only mainstream texts, we as teachers are perpetuating the same old type of hegemonic thinking. Now it is the time to open the corpus of the educative curricula to other literatures or world literatures. As McRae (1991) states, teacher should encourage “‘dynamic learning –learning which involves the students as actively and as personally as possible.” (p. 8). What it is true is that students prefer readings which can be packaged in an inviting, attractive way and not too long or obscure, apart from showing illustrations –there are still some teachers who are reluctant to include illustrated books because they think that these books are for lazy readers who want pictures to provide meaning, since they are not taking time to get from words. 

What is more, many of the books which these students have to read along the course come from native English speakers, while the English classroom should offer prodigious opportunities for the language-learning context which could be characterized by intercultural activities –not only the English culture, but also others such as Indian, Russian and Japanese ones. Literature in the English class takes the responsibility for intercultural learning, so that is why English as a lingua franca belongs to all cultures worldwide where English now plays a great role. Furthermore, according to the experienced teacher educator Janice Bland, “narratives are considered an important pedagogic medium, since they metonymically represent cultures of the language learner’s own world or cultures unfamiliar to them.” (2018, p. 3). Therefore, the teachers’ work is to use material which has been previously studied and analyzed, with which they can teach students more information about other cultures and traditions, “thus avoiding the perpetuation of stereotypes” (Miralles, 2018).

As Bland defends, today’s teenagers have to confront diversity and complexity increasingly, so that is one of the reasons why they need to be engaged with multicultural literary pieces “which will help them realize their agency and the power of imagination to prepare the world for change” (2018, p. XX). Indeed, these materials will invite students to a pleasant literary discussion among the class, apart from contributing to “a dynamic and multifaceted repertoire of knowledge both of the word and the world” (2018, p. XX). In the words of the linguist and educational researcher Stephen Krashen (1993), apart from being a major defender of the value of reading for pleasure:

When children read for pleasure, when they get “hooked on books”, they acquire, involuntarily and without conscious effort, nearly all of the so-called ‘language skills’ many people are so concerned about: They will become adequate readers, acquire a large vocabulary, develop the ability to understand and use complex grammatical instructions, develop a good writing style, and become good (but not necessarily perfect) spellers. Although free voluntary reading alone will not ensure attainment of the highest levels of literacy, it will at least ensure an acceptable level. Without it, I suspect that children simply do not have a chance. (Krashen, 1993, p. 84).