Teacher´s Main Aim of Using Literature in the Classroom

‘Literature provides wonderful source material for eliciting strong emotional responses from our students’ (Lazar, 1993: 3). By using literature in the language classroom, is a way of letting learners getting involved as whole people and provides them a lot of opportunities where they can express their feelings, personal opinions and reactions. Additionally, Kramsch (1993) argues that teaching literature reveals ‘its ability to represent the particular voice of a writer among the many voices of his or her community and thus to appeal to the particular in the reader’ (pp. 130 – 131 cited in Carroli, 2008: 8). Nevertheless, as teachers use the literature as an authentic text, learners immediately show their interest, as it is not an ordinary reading text which is found in the textbook. Thus, students from higher level can easily be absorbed by the plot and characters, as a result to acquire the new language at its best form. ‘The literature then becomes an important way of supplementing the inevitably restricted input of the classroom’ (Lazar, 1993: 17). Consequently, learners benefit from such authentic text, especially in linguistic areas such as grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Furthermore, the students will be encouraged to expand into political, historical and social aspects. Such aspects will form the cultural background of a particular play or novel. In addition to that, learners will have the opportunity to exchange their opinions and ideas of a poetry, novel or play. At first, it should be best for the learner to understand the language in order to appreciate the literature. The students should also be able to let the teachers help them with the most important features of interest in the text. Nevertheless, the main aim ...

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...ed to consider how long their text should last, if it is going to be long or short and the availability of the texts or books. Therefore, they need to consider if such texts fit with syllabus and what different kinds of texts will be needed in order to exploit the text given. Nevertheless, in order to find out what their learners are interested in, teachers’ use various ways of gathering data from their learners. One common way of collecting data is by interviewing or questioning the students. Another way of gathering data is by using a checklist. With checklists, teachers can remove or add any criteria they find important or less important throughout their research. Nevertheless, teachers need to consider a lot of things when teaching literature in the language. Consequently, if they are well prepared, then any disciplines in the language classroom will be avoided.