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Toward Wider Use of Literature in ESL: Why and How
Author(s) -
GAJDUSEK LINDA
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
tesol quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.737
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1545-7249
pISSN - 0039-8322
DOI - 10.2307/3586935
Subject(s) - communicative competence , contextualization , variety (cybernetics) , schema (genetic algorithms) , psychology , communicative language teaching , competence (human resources) , linguistics , context (archaeology) , exploit , pedagogy , language education , social psychology , computer science , philosophy , paleontology , computer security , artificial intelligence , machine learning , interpretation (philosophy) , biology
Although literature occupies a place in some advanced ESL courses, literary texts, which could permit us to achieve many important goals for a wide range of mature ESL students, remain largely neglected. After suggesting the variety of purposes that the use of literature in ESL can achieve, this article examines literature in terms of current ESL theory (discourse analysis, context and contextualization, schema theory, cross‐cultural awareness). This is done to explain not only why literature may be a more satisfying basis for ESL learning than more commonly used texts, but also what current theory suggests about how we should exploit this form in the classroom in order to encourage interactive, communicative classes for mature learners at a variety of levels of proficiency. The article then presents an orderly, four‐step approach to any literary text, an approach that obliges students to take responsibility for building their own successively more complex schemata (i.e., levels of understanding), which allow them to explore a text on successively more demanding levels. The theoretical approach is illustrated with reference to Hemingway's short story “Soldier's Home.”