Literature in English Language Teaching and the Challenges Encountered by EFL Learners

Reading Literature: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

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Reading Literature: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Introduction
This essay will describe and explain a one hour reading and comprehension lesson plan that is geared towards deepening and developing broad competence in reading literature among Asian students in an international school. The class of EFL learners is mainly composed of students between the ages of 13 and 14 with speaking and listening skills that are slightly below those of their UK counterparts in year 8 of the UK national curriculum. All students aren’t native speakers of English as the institution’s language of instruction but are required to acquire a strong command of the language before they can attain the proficiency levels required to succeed in a British educational environment. The course is intended to improve learners’ ability to construct meaning from written text in a comprehensive manner by activating prior knowledge, enhancing the student’s understanding of the language used in the text, and increasing awareness of the context in which the text is read. It is hoped that the reading literature lesson will increase students’ competency in facing various literary genres in terms of ability to read fluently, comprehend the text in an effective manner, and apply the implications of the text in a meaningful manner.
The text chosen for the proposed lesson is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which is widely regarded as a suitable addition to a junior high class in British literature. The novella provides an intriguing plot about the wildly contradictory behavior of Dr. Jekyll from the perspective of Mr. Hyde, to illustrate the interplay of good and evil. It also contains graceful writing, intense characters, and deals with important themes in a stimulating and relevant manner. Students are introduced to the strange case of Jekyll and Hyde through the eyes of the good-natured Mr. Utterson who slowly reveals the relationship between the lawyer’s friend, Dr. Jekyll, and the hideous Mr. Hyde. The class is geared towards increasing students’ understanding of the novella and ability to engage with the various linguistic facets and themes presented in the text. The students’ linguistic capacities are developed enough to begin addressing literary aspects such as themes and ideas contained in the book.
Literature in English Language Teaching (ELT)
The role of literature in language instruction dates back to the Formalists and Structuralists era, when ELT was synonymous with the teaching of literature. During this period, before the world war, literature enjoyed a successful spell in schools and was considered a model of first-rate language application and a basis for moral instruction: literature was considered as a subject matter that should underpin the language syllabus. However, the end of the colonial period saw literature lose its special status and proponents of the Functional Approach argued for the removal of literature from ELT (Luukka, 2019:8-10). Those in support of the functionalist theory of education theorized that the use of literature in ELT did not address the wants of language learners and that priority should be given to the functional use of language. This perception would continue even as schools adopted the Communicative Approach to ELT where literary texts were merely viewed as supplemental resources to familiarize learners with emblematic use of the language. A majority of the instruction materials developed during this period concentrated on particular language features and applications with little usage of the novelty of literary language in ELT.
Interestingly, the use of literature in ELT is once again reviving and making its way again into ELT. Various studies indicate that literary texts provide appropriate stimuli for students to develop identities in other languages, are laden with rich linguistic input, and can serve as a useful source of learner engagement. This time however, literature is no longer the central pillar in ELT, rather it serves as an appropriate reservoir of linguistic examination into discourse and stylistic analysis. Literary texts avail occasions for multi-sensorial classroom experiences and can meet the different learning needs, temperaments, and styles of EFL learners. Because of their loaded linguistic input, literature can help learners in developing speaking, reading, listening, writing, and comprehension skills, and improving familiarity with grammatical structures and new terminologies (Ahmed, 2009: 42-43). Literary texts provide an opportunity for learners to improve their awareness of other cultures and develop cultural competence and tolerance. They also address universal and complex themes such as love, morality, guilt, and loss, among others, which are rarely tackled in sanitized English course books. On the whole, literature is representational in that it does not communicate in a unidirectional manner but engages the reader emotionally and cognitively.
Second Language Reading: Show Clear Linguistic Evidence to Support Stylistic Effect
Despite the growing recognition of the importance of literature in ELT among educators, there is a lack of research on the second language reading, a far more complicated area than first language reading. The general assumption that study findings from first language reading can be applied without any significant problems to second language reading is misleading owing to the significant variables involved in the latter. However, current literature on second language literature readers indicates that students find literary texts at a purely linguistic level less readable and that non-standard language features and vocabulary cause particular problems for this group of learners (Geoff Hall, 2015: 88-89). Issues with literal comprehension as a result of learners’ low levels of English proficiency can hamper literal understanding. Students tend to focus on the unfamiliar words and miss the more consequential connections. Moreover, less fluent readers tend to miss the formal and subtle features of the literary text such as punctuation and word choice. It is therefore not surprising that such literary devices as irony, puns, point of view, and comedy among others are typically considered as obstacles.
Despite these challenges, second language readers are generally excited to read through literary texts for pleasure: the sense of encountering people living in different eras and cultures from themselves is thrilling in itself. The reluctance of second language readers to literary texts has been assumed to stem from the difficulty of literary texts in linguistic terms like syntax, vocabulary, word structure, and the demanding structure at the level of genre and rhetoric. Another critical challenge in literature reading as relates to second language readers concerns vocabulary: students tend to become frustrated when they encounter words, they are not familiar with or even fail to notice that some words may have alternative meanings (Geoff Hall, 2015: 91). For these reasons, it is best to ensure that learners have a rudimentary understanding of these language issues before jumping into literary devices. It is also critical for educators to negotiate with second language readers when engaging with language as discourse in order to make literature reading a fulfilling activity in ELT.
Current literature indicates that besides linguistic challenges, second language readers also encounter cultural challenges during reading comprehension. The cultural similarity and dissimilarity of the text can present greater opportunities or impediments than language issues. It is possible to overcome linguistic difficulties encountered by learners if the instructor makes the cultural background referred to in the text familiar to students. Cultural understandings are critical to improving linguistic proficiencies and making the text more readable (Geoff Hall, 2015: 92-93). The instructor must anticipate difficulties among students in processing texts culturally and linguistically. For instance, the ability of learners to appreciate others’ points of view must be fostered first through familiarization of the text’s cultural background. Literature must be capable of aiding learners’ ability to appreciate other people’s values, perceptions, and attitudes in order to avoid misinterpreting or missing the original meanings of the author. The teacher must therefore design appropriate supporting activities and scaffolds for classroom use to navigate cultural difficulties that may hinder student understanding of the literature.
On the whole, existing literature on second language readers shows that background knowledge and reading is critical in reading comprehension. The learner’s prior knowledge, understanding, and standpoint are important to comprehension of any literary text. Students understand a text through inference, which is when students fill in knowledge gaps. The process of reading and comprehending literature involves more about understanding the situations and relations between characters than successful literary reading (Alkhaleefah, 2017: 194-195). However, for most students, inferencing is often deferred until later, usually after finishing reading the passage. Learners tend to focus on the surface meanings and postpone judgment until they see what the whole passage is all about. Literary reading is therefore more about indeterminacy and successful literary readers manage to continue reading despite the extended ambiguity. Students are therefore interested in knowing what new words really meaning in order to understand the point being made and therefore vocabulary explanation is an important aspect of literary comprehension.
Lesson Introduction I included the step by step analysis that informed my lesson design along with the procedure to give more context.
The following lesson procedure will demonstrate teaching strategies employed before, during, and after reading in order to improve reading and comprehension competencies.
Procedure
The lesson phases are described below along with relevant commentary
Pre-reading Activities (10 minutes)
I will begin by helping my students relax, close their eyes, and listen to the newspaper excerpt that describes life in London during the Victorian era. I will then proceed to read a portion of the Whitechapel Road on a Saturday Night newspaper article as well as certain excerpts from the novel that vividly relate the social problems, zoning laws, gothic charms, and general peculiarities of London and its peoples during the Victorian era. Afterwards I will ask the students to open their eyes and question them on their impressions of London during the period. This imagery exercise will be followed by a discussion of the formal diction and vocabulary used during the nineteenth century that learners, especially EFL students, rarely confront in their reading. I will use context clues to demonstrate how one can decipher the meaning of new words using context, word parts, and reference materials. I will then proceed to introduce the ideas and themes that were of interest to writers of the period such as addiction, science, psychology, and the self.
Providing background knowledge of the book’s plot, characters, setting, and themes is essential to eradicating linguistic and cultural barriers to reading and comprehension among EFL learners. For instance, the context of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, may be unfamiliar to most EFL learners given that the book is an urban gothic thriller set in Victorian times. Without the correct background of Victorian London, it would be challenging for students to understand the hideous split personality of Dr. Jekyll. Besides, most students, including native English learners, are somewhat unaccustomed to the language style used by nineteenth century Romantic artists or the choice of subjects they emphasized such as intuition, feeling, macabre, imagination, or the infernal. Such themes as the irrational conditions of the human mind, reason versus the supernatural, dual nature, or limits of scientific experimentation are rarely covered in contemporary literature works. For this reason, providing background knowledge to EFL learners of all these text features is critical to activating and developing relevant schema, and readying them for the reading and comprehension exercise. For instance, it is impossible to introduce students to every new word they encounter during the reading exercise in a tightly packed schedule. Consequently, showing them how to independently decipher the meanings of seldom used words and phrases using context, word parts, and reference materials is not only useful for their comprehension of the text but also in their vocabulary building (Grabe, 2012: 23-27).
Using Paran’s quadrants, the purpose of this text can be described as focusing on both language learning and literature: the lesson will concentrate on literature knowledge and skills as well as linguistic features contained in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The chosen text is linguistically interesting in that it contains a complex set of phonetics, phonology, syntax, pragmatics, morphology, and semantics. Students will find stimulating combinations of individual speech sounds, units of language (suffixes and prefixes), sentences and phrases, and sentence meanings. In addition to language learning, other significant educational goals the text fulfills include promoting students’ intercultural competence and background knowledge of native language speakers. The text exposes students to English language and culture thereby improving learners’ perception of themselves and the world of native speakers. The text also prepares the student for ‘in-depth cultural analysis typically found in advanced courses’ by covering different layers of cultural meanings and symbols, complex cultural contexts, along with diverse emotional experiences. The text incorporates the holistic structure of English culture by uniting the components of participants, ritual activity, time, meaning, and space.
Guided Reading (15 minutes)
I will read the first fifteen pages of the book with the students and use a projector to increa...