Teaching Language and Literature: A Course Book

The use of literature for language teaching purposes has always been acontroversial issue in different contexts all around the world. It is still beingdiscussed whether it is a good idea to include literary works in the course materiallist of language classrooms because even though literary works enable learners tosee authentic samples of the target language, give them a chance to understandthe culture of the target community better and to practice the target language indifferent aspects, the complexity of the language presented to readers and the lengthof books make it difficult for teachers to use them with learners of different levels.With the new curriculum suggested by Turkish Higher Education Council(YÖK) in 2018 for Faculties of Education, 2 courses, ‘Literature and LanguageTeaching I-II’, were replaced by 2 other courses, ‘Teaching Language and LiteratureI-II’ including some slight changes which were added to the course lists of EnglishLanguage Teaching Departments in Faculties of Education in Turkey. Thesecourses aim to train prospective teachers of English with a good command of notonly theoretical information about different literary genres such as short stories,novels, plays and poems but also ideas related to their practice in the languageclassroom. After a series of discussions with colleagues from different universitiesin Turkey, we agreed that we needed a course material that would facilitate theduty of teachers teaching this course and that would give students a chance to gofurther than a simple analysis of literary works. For this reason, the aim of thisbook is to provide students with theoretical information about the main literaryforms and some practical ideas for using them in the language classroom. Thisvolume is composed of the following parts:Chapter 1 tries to explain the concept of “literature” in general and itscontribution to the field of language teaching. It also lists some different approachesto the study of literature in the language classroom based on multiple activities.Chapter 2 deals with “short story” as a literary form, starting with itsdefinition, its historical development and main elements. The second part of thechapter discusses the advantages and possible challenges of using short stories forlanguage teaching purposes and suggests variousactivities based on a short storyby a well-known author.Chapter 3 focuses on novels, which is a very popular course material inlanguage classrooms and it suggests a variety of tasks which are applicable in theclassroom while using novels.Introduction vChapter 4 focuses on plays as course materials which might serve serve manydifferent purposes in the language classroom. After giving brief informationabout what it refers to and its historical development, this chapter suggests someclassroom activities that might be used to improve students’ language skills.Chapter 5 explains what poetry is, along with types and characteristics ofpoems. It also deals with different types of literary devices and how to use poemsin the language classroom.