LITERATURE, A HELPFUL AND POWERFUL TOOL IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

The use of course-books in ELT leads to a reductionist view of language learning, through which language learners are led to believe that language is a set of transactions that they need to learn in order to reach academic standards. Such belief prevents our students from looking at language learning as an instrument of constructive social empowerment. The course-books methods do not nourish students’ capacity for imaginative and expressive use of language, subjecting them to a language learning experience with no any educationally worthwhile return, which denies them from agency and voice. Before such a situation, the use of imaginative content becomes an urgent educational priority in the language classroom and as literature abounds in imaginative language, it can be included in the language learning process.

Once the students have begun to acquire a new language, they need to know something about what they can do with that language. One good way to explore the possibilities of what we can do with a language is by looking at the work of writers who, at different moments in the history of a culture, have explored that language to their best ability and so have extended the boundaries of its use. By teaching literature, what teachers are actually teaching is highly skilful language usage, and by reading literary texts, teachers and students can study the ways in which a writer can shape language and make it richer and more powerful. Even those people who claim they never read poetry and never write it, on special occasions, they actually turn to poetry, for instance, birth cards, anniversary cards, Valentine cards, which are messages written in verse.

The use of literature in the language teaching and learning process brings many advantages, such as, language acquisition, motivation in the classroom, development of cultural awareness in students, and it can also produce good educational and social outcomes, for instance, the education of human emotions and the contribution to social sensitivity, for the engagement with literature puts students in contact with the personalities of different types of peoples, and this leads them to learn to imaginatively put themselves into the places of others.

Thus, literary texts can provide an escape route for teachers, for they illustrate cultural patterns that represent a plurality of beliefs, attitudes, ideas and ways of life. Literature gives us a sense of how complex the societies are and how complex their cultures are. The written literature alerts us to various possibilities and alternatives that exist outside the culture we are born into. This influence of literary texts can play a vital role in helping students visualize new social and economic orders. In this context, we can point out that an illiterate or unread individual will either have little or no understanding of how his society functions on the basis of its culture, and thus, this individual will not be able to contribute to social or democratic changes.

As we can see, literature can be a helpful and powerful tool for the teaching and learning process, for it provides material not only for language teaching and learning, but also for making students citizens able to understand and to contribute for the changes in their societies.