时间：2022-02-27 07:18:48
Years ago, the role of literature in the EFL classroom was questioned due to the influence of modern linguistics. Some modern linguists put spoken language prior to written language. They believe deeply that written words are static, so written language can not be used by people in daily communication. It sounds logic, but, from my personal point of view, it is too narrow-minded. For a language learner, written language is equally important.
According to Collie & Salter (2006), written words are important because they record the “fundamental human issues” which will always exist. The issues like love, friendship, marriage are eternal topics of human beings. By using literature as teaching materials, teachers can their students learn language in a “genuine and undistorted” way.
As Lazar (2005) writes later “although your learners are at quite an elementary level linguistically, their emotional and intellectual understanding is rather sophisticated” (p.52). To put it another way, based on carefully-selected literary texts, teachers can motivate their students to discuss about some complicated issues, such as war or race, even though their English knowledge is limited.
Reading literature can help to increase students’ cultural awareness (CA). However, the following questions should be answered: What is culture? Why culture learning is so important for language learners? What is CA? What goals can teachers reach with raising students’ CA? How does reading literature help students raise their CA?
Tomalin & Stempleski (1996) define CA as “the term we have used to describe sensitivity to the impact of culturally-induced behavior on language use and communication” (p. 5). It sounds very abstract. With the modified ‘seven goals of cultural instruction’ based on Ned Seelye’s Teaching Culture, we can understand the definition of CA and its importance much better:
1.“To help students to develop an understanding of the fact that all people exhibit culturally-conditioned behaviors.
2.To help students to develop an understanding that social variables such as age, sex, social class, and place of residence influence the ways in which people speak and behave.
3.To help students to become more aware of conventional behavior in common situations in the target culture.
4.To help students to increase their awareness of the cultural connotations of words and phrases in the target language.
5.To help students to develop the ability to evaluate and refine generalizations about the target culture, in terms of supporting evidence.
6.To help students to develop the necessary skills to locate and organize information about the target culture.
7.To stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity about the target culture, and to encourage empathy towards its people.”(Tomalin & Stempleski, 1996, p. 8)
Language teachers should keep these goals in mind and put them into teaching practice when they make plans for their class. In brief, as Kramsch (1993a) declares, “cultural awareness and the learning of a second culture can only aid the attaining of second language proficiency” (p.257; cited in Henkel, 1999, p. 6).
Now we know that raising CA is crucial for language learners. The next question is what the positive effects of reading literature on raising students’ CA are. As Lazar (2005) points out, culture is related with its literature in a complicated way. To put it differently, a lot of literary works are fictional, so it seems questionable if culture will be truly reflected in these fictions. (p.16) To answer this question, Collie & Salter (2006) writes:
“It is true of course that the ‘world’ of a novel, play, or short story is a created one, yet it offers a full and vivid context in which characters from many social backgrounds can be depicted….This vivid imagined world can quickly give the foreign reader a feel for the codes and preoccupations that structure a real society.”(p.4)
Collie & Salter (2006) believes that reading literature with historical background provides students an opportunity to image what has happened at that time and what people’s life looked like in that country. It is especially important for the language learners who probably never get the chance to travel or live in that country where the language is spoken. That is the reason why they are encouraged to watch films, read newspapers, or read literature in that target language. In this way, they can get to know a little bit about the way how people live in that country. (p.4)
The next question Lazar (2005) raises is if fiction stories can be the reflection of a culture, should language learners believe in all the cultural information these stories convey? If not, how can teachers guide their students to get proper cultural information instead of making generalization about a certain culture? These questions are very important for teaching cultural information in the EFL classroom. Teachers should be extremely careful about them. Otherwise, students can easily form ideologies and stereotypes about other cultures. The task of language teachers here is to encourage their students to think critically about all the information they get from a literary text. Teachers should emphasize the importance of critical thinking ability. Students need to be aware of the fact that they should read the literature critically instead of simply believing everything they read. (p.16)