Teaching Foreign Language Literature

An Effective Approach to Foreign Literature in the Classroom

Aug 26, 2009 Francesca Aniballi

How teaching foreign language literature can enhance pupils' language skills and self-confidence.

All too often pupils are confronted with daunting foreign language literary texts before they have reached the appropriate language level to tackle them. This is due to the curriculum structure and teachers sometimes consider it unavoidable. Yet, it is possible to bring educational, literary and linguistic objectives together by developing a suitable foreign literature teaching practice.

A Student-Centred Approach to Foreign Language Literature

In order to make students profit from the literary experience in the classroom, it is fundamental to develop activities which stimulate their personal response, as a springboard to further linguistic and textual analysis. The teacher must have the ability to make her/his pupils discover the underlying connections between the linguistic system and the particular story, novel, poem or play they are reading.

To this effect, activities such as brainstorming, anticipation, jigsaw reading, lecturettes, group work on research projects, role playing, sequel writing, inventing a conclusion to a story, script writing or writing a short parody are extremely valuable to let students manipulate and produce language. It is only by involving them, so that they want to express their own point of view, that their language skills will develop and self-confidence in foreign language usage will ensue.

Educational, Literary and Linguistic Objectives

The teacher has to bear in mind that her/his objectives when teaching foreign literature are manifold: s/he has to develop approaches and activities aimed at educational, literary and linguistic objectives at the same time. Thus fostering pupils' sense of self-esteem and self-knowledge, teaching them to co-operate, while being independent, should go hand in hand with developing their sense of what sounds right and natural in the language they are learning as well as their knowledge of a particular author, literary genre or novel.

The point is that all these objectives should not be pigeon-holed; literature is a bottomless well of human experience, whereby cognitive, affective, aesthetic and linguistic development has to be favored. In order to engage her/his pupils' whole imagination and senses, the teacher needs to be creative and be ready to step ouf of the beaten track, encouraging pupils to find ever new connections between their own experiences and feelings and the literary texts they are reading.

Democratizing Literature

Carter and Long (1991) stress how the successful teacher will make students love literature and reading for the rest of their lives, rather than just equipping them for the next examination paper. Widdowson (1992) goes further, by pointing out the need to "democratize" literature, by giving students complete freedom of interpretation. In this way the teacher can tap into their vast emotional potential for fresh outlooks and responses.

This is a way of freeing literature from the strait-jacket of institutionalized authority and of giving it back to young adults, thus retrieving its educational, aesthetic, critical potential for every reader. It is a rewarding path both for the pupils and the teacher, as it unleashes their creativity into a potentially endless spiral of intake, reflection, assimilation and new knowledge production.

Educational, literary and linguistic objectives can be worked through harmoniously. In fact a multi-layered approach to foreign language literature, as a rich source of linguistic stimuli and prompts, can turn into a winning strategy for foreign language teaching and learning.

Works Cited:

Carter, R. and Long, M. N., Teaching Literature, London, Longman, 1991.

Widdowson, H., Practical Stylistics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992.

The copyright of the article Teaching Foreign Language Literature in Teacher Tips/Training is owned by Francesca Aniballi. Permission to republish Teaching Foreign Language Literature in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Reading Foreign Language Literature is a Pleasure

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