Why include literature in English Language learning? Part II

Surprisingly, not a great deal has been added to theoretical aspects of the place of literature in the English Language curriculum in the last decades and in many cases the same authors are reediting and updating their original work. For example John McRae has updated his book “The Language of Poetry” (2003, first published in 1998) and Carter’s “Investigating English Discourse: Language, Literacy, Literature” first published in 1997 was reprinted in 2003. University bibliographies on the topic still quote the authors in my previous entry. I would however identify a shift in the emphasis of the literature which is now more concerned with methodological and pedagogical aspects of teaching literature, than justification and general theory. Almost forty years after Widdowson’s “Stylistics”, the benefits of using literary texts with English learners is still being discussed and proposed by many authors. Ronald Carter himself who is presently Research Professor of Modern English Language, Faculty of Arts at the University of Nottingham UK, is still researching on practical aspects of this topic in articles such as Literature and Language Awareness: Using literature to achieve CEFR outcomes in Journal of Second Language Teaching and Research (2011). His colleague at Nottingham, Peter Stockwell with whom Carter has written The Language and Literature Reader (2008) has recently written articles such as On Teaching Literature Itself (2007) which you can read on his Academia.edu page Gillian Lazar is still investigating and lecturing on this subject and has recently written an article on the topic 'Meanings and Metaphors' (2003), published by Cambridge University Press, in which she proposes ways of exploiting metaphors in literary texts in the English class to develop learner autonomy enhance creativity and increase vocabulary learning. Much is being investigated regarding the types of materials to be used in second language classrooms such as articles by B. A. Smallwood, Center for Applied Linguistics and Vardell Hadaway and Young Matching books and readers: Selecting literature for English learners. In conclusion, the issues which concern educators at the moment are not about whether to teach literature in EFL, ESL and EAL classes, but rather which types of materials to use and which teaching strategies to employ.