Teaching Language through Literature

Teaching Language through Literature
(First published in The Island/Friday 12th November, 2010)
Children love to play with language. Toddlers sometimes coin their own non-sense musical phrases and enjoy singing them repeatedly. Older children play games in which singing is an essential accompaniment to physical movements. They like to listen to stories and relate ones which they already know or which they make up. Children display a natural dramatic talent. They enjoy reciting poetry. The love of using their language creatively for the sheer joy of it is natural to humans, and is at the root of the creation of, and the engagement with, literature. This situation can be exploited to promote the learning of English as a second language by including a literary element in the English curriculum from the beginning.
Some educators in the past rejected the use of literary texts as ‘drill materials’ for the development of the four basic language skills on the grounds that in such a situation students would learn neither language nor literature sufficiently well. Therefore they preferred to defer the introduction of literature to a later stage when the students would be expected to have gained enough mastery of the language to respond to literature without difficulty. However, with the communicative language teaching approach steadily gaining currency, and the ‘drill’ aspect of language practice becoming less emphasized, this attitude changed. Today it is normal to incorporate literary pieces in English language textbooks.
Literature provides interesting language practice materials. It affords a chance for the learners to be aware of the creative possibilities of language that enable them to communicate ideas and states of mind beyond the merely routine, utilitarian level. Behind its apparent triviality, literature hides that which makes us human in a profound sense. It has its birth in the human passion for creating beautiful forms by drawing on the resources of language, such as the sound and sense of words, rhythm, rhyme, etc. Words are the raw material that literary artists shape into formal beauty. There is pleasure in creating literature, and in reacting to it. In spite of the pleasure element that literature is ordinarily associated with, it is nevertheless serious business, for it is concerned with intensely felt experience. Through its formal beauty literature helps us to reflect on the deeply sorrowful aspect of our existence (bereavement, betrayal, loss, and endless other eventualities) which all humans share, and just as well, to celebrate the most cherished things in life (love, marriage, birth of a baby, fulfilment of hopes, discovery of beauty, and the rest). In the end, we experience the “serene joy” of coming to terms with the bitter-sweet nature of our existence. Thus literature increases our capacity for making sense of our world, for expressing it, and for sharing it with our fellow humans, which enriches our humanity.
In literature, therefore, language is used for exploring a level of experience that goes beyond the merely physical to encompass our emotional life in which we actually ‘live’, in the sense that we are concerned with such things as the ultimate meaning, the frustrations and the fulfilments, and the agonies and the ecstasies of our existence, and above all with the ultimate joy of living in the face of these contradictions. It is not that these abstract notions about the value of literature should be conveyed to the students verbally; in reality, it would be after many years of familiarity with literature that generalisations such as those come within their powers of comprehension. But children have an instinctive fascination with the mysterious power of language to transport them to a different plane of experience.
Literature usually involves four forms: essay, poetry, fiction, and drama; but now we also include film in this list. Though both drama and film are primarily for watching, the manuscripts of plays and the shooting scripts of films can be read and enjoyed as literature. All these literary forms represent language being used for interpreting the world of experience, and communicating it to others through the engagement of their aesthetic sense (= ability to enjoy things of beauty).
The prevalent communicative language teaching principles would suggest that literature is an easily exploitable resource for language instruction. The great potential of literature as a context for pleasurable as well as useful language practice lies in its intrinsic appeal to youthful creativity, its inclusion of all the four basic language skills and more, and its wide scope for collaborative engagement among the students, in addition to individual interaction with the texts.
My comments here relate to the teaching of English as a second language to Sri Lankan students. Of course, no such thing as teaching the language exclusively through literature is intended. Literature is viewed here as one important way of using language. Language teaching and learning should involve more than literature. The important thing is that when specimens of literature are presented as components of an English teaching course they should be subordinated to the actual purpose of using literature in that situation, which is providing an interesting context for authentic language use. But the value of the texts as literature should not be discounted. Otherwise, there will be no difference between the other forms of texts included in the same course and the literature pieces in their treatment, rendering the latter redundant.
However, it is obvious that we cannot initiate our students to all the intricacies of the literary experience from the word go, although its essence is nascent in the crudest form of their contact with literature. Just as an insistence on perfect grammar, pronunciation, and accent, etc tends to frighten students out of a purposeful attempt to learn English, so a perceptibly rigid concern on the part of teachers to deal with literary texts exclusively as literature will kill the second language learners’ interest in them. What the teachers can exploit, particularly at the beginning level, is literature’s appeal to the children’s native love of using language creatively for the pleasure it generates.
In the language teaching context, therefore, the value of literature lies in its potential for providing a context for authentic linguistic communication in a unique aspect of language use. Creative literature uses language for exploring the world of imagination, thought, and values, as distinct from using it to deal with merely factual and utilitarian information. The usual English language textbooks contain a few examples of literature such as simple poems, short stories, extracts from longer fiction, or drama, and essays among a majority of non-literary texts. The way that student interaction with non-literary texts is stage-managed (that is, the way non-literary texts are taught, in traditional terms) is not suitable for stimulating interaction with literary texts.
The sort of literature presented to students for engagement and enjoyment should be graded according to their age and their level of attainment in English language proficiency. Thus at the primary level, singing nursery rhymes would be a good introduction to the literary experience through the delightful music of the words, and the visual images that the rhymes conjure. Children may be given the opportunity to draw pictures to illustrate their songs as an additional activity.
At the same time, the amount of contribution that they make towards the real purpose of the lesson – linguistic development – should be the determinant criterion in the selection and assignment of learning tasks. For example, what useful purpose will learning and singing nursery rhymes serve apart from the delightfulness of the activity itself? It will serve to teach the children the pronunciation of English sounds; when they memorise the verses, they remember some chunks of English which they can repeat later in appropriate contexts, and this would increase their familiarity with English, and also give them a sense of confidence about their ability to learn the language. It would also be good for students to be asked to compose their own poems.
There are other criteria to be taken into consideration in the selection of samples of English literature for the English curriculum.
Since our real focus is teaching English as a second language, and not teaching English literature for its own sake, the specimens chosen should necessarily exemplify contemporary English, English from around the world as well as what we are familiar with in Sri Lanka. English literature is being produced in many countries and cultures, and there is an inexhaustible literary commonwealth for curriculum makers to draw on. So there probably is no vacancy for Chaucer or Shakespeare in an English language course book except in a modernised version. Selections may be from any number of English using countries around the world including our own.
The selections should be appropriate for the age, the interests, the proficiency level and the cultural background of the students. The literariness of the texts can be increasingly emphasized as the students’ language proficiency grows. Since unconventional use of language is normal in literature, especially in poetry, sophisticated literary texts are not suitable for beginning language students. These should be introduced at the higher levels where the learners know what the conventional forms are well enough to identify deliberate deviations from the norm that writers use to create special literary effects.
The purpose of including literature in the English curriculum is to exploit the potential it has for generating interesting classroom interaction and discussion in the language. A story, a poem, an essay, or a piece of drama can lead to lively discussion among the students, when it is well handled by a knowledgeable teacher. Usually, there are two kinds of questions that are asked to guide the students: specific and general. To illustrate these, I’ll refer to James Thurber’s (1894-1961) short humorous essay “The Moth and the Star”. If teacher guidance is limited to asking such specific comprehension questions as “Who did the young moth tell about his love of the star?”, “What was her reply?”, “What did she ask him to set his heart on instead?”, or “Was his father happy about the moth’s behaviour?” etc, these will get ready answers from the students, but lead to limited classroom discussion. An exclusive general question like “Whose point of view, in your opinion, is the author supportive of, the young moth’s or his parents’?” should naturally invite a variety of responses, and hence create more discussion, but may be a bit too challenging for the majority of the students to tackle. (Readers may visit my literature blog heli29.wordpress.com for the text of Thurber’s essay) A more sensible approach would be to first ensure the students’ understanding of the facts of the story through specific questioning, and then to enable them grasp what interesting point of view or argument or theme the separate facts build up to.
If, for the sake of asserting our common humanity, we want English to bring the peoples of the world to us, and to take us to them across all kinds of cultural, political, social, and other barriers, reading English literature from around the world and adding our own share to the ever expanding literary commonwealth will prove the surest way to do that. By incorporating good specimens of English literature in the second language textbook materials for developing language facility through maximising communication and interaction among the students in the literary use of the language, we can take our first steps towards that lofty ideal.