Literature for language learningstudents' and teachers' views

Abstract

Language teachers struggle every day with the task of engaging and motivating students and of teaching language meaningfully. A way of achieving these two goals can be by teaching language through literature. Scholarly research has sustained the advantages of this mutually beneficial and productive interaction, emphasising how using literary texts can offer rich input for language acquisition, can be a source of motivation, stimulate learning and develop cultural knowledge and understanding. Although the division between language and literature is still rigid in many contexts (Bloemert et al., 2019), several studies have been developed to promote this integration within the global context of FL education (Carter, 2015). From a diachronic point of view, up until the 1940s, literature was extensively adopted in schooling by means of the Grammar-Translation approach. However, the use of literature in teaching a foreign language started to decline with the advent of the Direct method (the 1940s-50s), the Situational method (1950s-60s), and the Audio-Lingual method (1960s-80s), as pointed out by Aydinoglu (2013). This decline continued through the first years of the rise of the Communicative Approach (Carroli, 2002), even though a new paradigm involving the integration of language and literature emerged in the late 1980s arising from the communicative need to use authentic materials. Since then, the possibility of improving language acquisition through literature has been posited by various authors (Collie & Slater, 2009). However, studies which empirically investigate these alleged advantages are extremely rare. The general absence of empirical classroom-based research was mentioned by Hanauer (2001) and Hall (2007) who asserted that arguments about the use of literature in ELT were mostly theoretical and never empirically demonstrated. It is also important to point out that most of the empirical studies published so far have been conducted entirely in university settings (Paran, 2008). Moreover, researchers have studied only a single literary genre in their inquiries, usually prose or, less frequently, poetry, while no study has ever compared two or more genres. In addition, as Fogal (2015) and Férez et al. (2020) have stressed, not many studies have carried out research based on a thorough methodology. Other research gaps are linked to the lack of studies about students' attitudes toward literature in L1 contexts and the absence of studies that compare teachers' views with the students' views regarding the use of literature to learn a foreign language. Considering these research gaps, this study has two main objectives. Firstly, it aims to examine the linguistic, sociocultural and motivational benefits, as perceived by high school students and teachers, of conducting ELT utilizing three different literary genres. Participants' views are explored before and after they experienced three lessons plans designed to explore the advantages of using poems, novels and theatre plays for ELT. Secondly, this thesis taps into high school students' views regarding how poetry, drama and novels have been used in L2 and L1 contexts when it comes to enhancing their linguistic and sociocultural competence as well as their motivation. This study adopts a mixed-method approach to gaining a better understanding of complex phenomena by combining numeric trends from quantitative data and specific details from qualitative data. For the quantitative data collection, we used questionnaires based on a 5-point Likert scale, while, to gather qualitative data, we interviewed teachers and students, asked participants to write answers to specific questions related to the designed lesson plans and to provide observations about their experience using literature in their L1 and FL classes. This thorough methodology could provide in-depth statistical results and detailed qualitative explanations. Words could be used to add meaning to numbers and numbers could be used to add precision to words. By comparing three genres, our research could facilitate the organization of a holistic and coherent syllabus based on literary texts, with the aim of developing linguistic, cultural, and motivational skills.