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).
