The Avatars of Literature in Language Study

Abstract

This article documents the changing role that literature has played in foreign language teaching as seen through the articles published in the MLJ between 1916 and 1999. Literature has been used for the aesthetic education of the few (1910s), for the literacy of the many (1920s), for moral and vocational uplift (1930s–1940s), for ideational content (1950s), for humanistic inspiration (1960s–1970s), and for providing an ‘authentic’ experience of the target culture (1980s–1990s). At the present time, although the study and the teaching of literature are virtually absent from the MLJ, ‘literariness’ in language acquisition research is far from dead. By illuminating the pervasive presence of the literary in the teaching of foreign languages over the century, this retrospective may provide support for the current interest in voice, style, and culture in applied linguistics and help this strand of research find its way in the pages of the MLJ.

Exploring EFL literature approaches in Dutch secondary education

“…The imagination, interpretation, and representation of the human experience form the core of the humanities (Carter, 2007;Ceia, 2012). Culture plays a fundamental role in the interaction between language and thought (Kramsch & Kramsch, 2000).…”

Communicative performance in the written discourse of undergraduate students: what can literature offer?

“…Though the concepts 'acquisition' and 'learning' have continued to generate arguments, this study follows Krashen (1982) and Ugwuanyi and Chukwu (2016) to say that the terms can be used interchangeably so far as they both refer to the processes of 'picking up' a language. Several researchers (e.g., Akwanya, 2007;Canale & Swain, 1980;Hall, 2005;Krashen, 1982;and Kramsch & Kramsch, 2000) have argued very forcefully that since learning a language largely involves the learners being given enough exposure to the language, the processes involved in learning a first language can also be employed in teaching a second language. One way of doing this is to give the learners activities that can immerse them into the language being learned.…”

Cosmopolitan speakers and their cultural cartographies

“…In such understandings, language learners draw both on their past social histories and their future personal desires. Following recent critical thinking on the role and place of transnational and intercultural encounters in language pedagogy (Kramsch 2009;Risager 2007;Starkey 2011) and the transferability of the concept of the Cosmopolitan Outlook (Beck 2006) from sociology to language pedagogy, I propose to add a new dimension to the concept of Intercultural Competence (Byram 1997), which builds on the notion of the Intercultural Speaker (IS) (Byram and Fleming 1998). I will call this new dimension, the Cosmopolitan Speaker (CS).…”

“…Rather, they often cohere and participate in different communities simultaneously, which can be local as well as transnational (in their countries of origin or in the diaspora). Similarly, today's language learners and multilingual subjects (Kramsch 2009) also carry out their cultural encounters in a world impregnated with a variety of multicultural products and meanings.…”