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Title
Introducing Literature to an EFL Classroom:
Teacher’s Presentations and Students’ Perceptions
Presenter
Fan-ping Tseng
Abstract
The value of literature in language teaching has been sporadically recognized in ESL/EFL contexts over the past two decades; nevertheless, literature teaching still received less attention in empirical research. To contribute to this sparse yet potential research field, this study documents a teacher’s presentations of literary works to a class of 28 Taiwanese EFL senior high school students, and reports on those students’ perceptions of the texts introduced and their attitudes towards different literary genres.
In about fourteen weeks in a semester, the teacher introduced to students 24 literary texts, which included nine poems, seven short stories and articles, two novels, and six plays. Among these literary works, the poems and short stories were presented in their original texts, while the two novels (i.e., The Da Vinci Code and The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and the six plays (e.g., Hamlet, Oedipus the King and Turandot) were introduced by means of the synopses or plot summaries drawn from the Internet, along with some related film and music. The notion of computer assisted literature teaching (CALT) was implemented in the teacher’s preparation for presenting novels and plays.
At the end of the semester, the students were asked to fill out a 50-item questionnaire about their perceptions of the 24 literary texts and their attitudes towards different literary genres. The results of the questionnaire showed that students like the presented novels most, followed by plays, short stories, and then poems. Furthermore, students generally like to read literary works and also like to be introduced to literature, and they prefer to read short stories, novels (especially movie novels), and realistic fiction.
Based on the findings of this study, pedagogical implications are raised, particularly concerning literary materials design. The study then ends with some reflections upon EFL teachers’ mindset of introducing literature to their students, arguing that there is no literature threshold for teachers to cross before they can teach literature to students. As long as teachers are willing to introduce literature to students, there are countless aids to help them have a successful literature class.
Keywords:- value of literature in language teaching, attitudes towards different literary genres,
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