Training or Education? Literary Texts in the Secondary EFL Classroom

Amos Paran, Reader in Second Language Education, UCL Institute of Education

My own personal context¡ Large amount of literature in primary and secondary

school in EFL and FLE

¡ English literature degree and teaching diploma

¡ My test lesson was on Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts

¡ Taught in Israeli secondary schools (years 9-12) where 40% of the time was devoted to literature

¡ PhD work: on cognitive aspects of reading in L1 and L2 –measured the reading times of words in a running text. Lots of stats!

¡ Coordinator of the IATEFL Literature Special Interest Group (LitSIG) for 12 years

¡ Currently co-convenor of the AILA Literature in Language Learning and Teaching Research Network

Reasons for using literary texts¡Educational reasons: viewing English

language teaching as education, not training

¡Psychological reasons: building on the human common ground

¡Linguistic reasons: building on what people do with language and with literature

¡Pedagogical reasons: responding to our wishes and wants as teachers

A constant battleEducation reforms have disfigured relationships and intentions built on care and learning by preferencing the data and competition inherent in neoliberalism.

Schoolingandculture.org

Language education and economic advantage¡ Immersion education in Canada – anglophone

parents in Quebec ensuring economic prospects of children in a Francophone society (Swain & Johnson 1997)

¡ English has ‘an excellent utility value’ and parents believe that ‘a high command of English will further their children’s chances on the labour market (Gierlinger 2007:91)

¡ “CLIL is treated as a commodity that will be ‘sold’ to parents, presented in ‘open days’ or explained in letters to parents” (Gierlinger 2007:95.)

¡ Dobson et al (2010): teachers saw the implementation of a a bilingual policy as benefiting recruitment to the school and adding to its prestige

¡ Seikkula-Leino (2007): the advantages from improving English outweigh the possible limitations in mathematics learning

¡ Overall, a very strong efficiency rhetoric

¡ Competitiveness

¡ League tables at all local, national and international levels

¡ And the winner is …..

The Prohibited PARSNIP (Gray 2002)

¡ Politics

¡ Alcohol

¡ Religion

¡ Sex

¡ Narcotics

¡ Isms

¡ Pork

Talking Point

¡ Which is your most treasured carrier bag? Where did it come from? What makes a classy carrier bag?

¡ Do you collect anything else which might seem strange to other people?

Corrolaries: What we talk about

Progression of topics in one unit of a contemporary coursebook(Navigate, Roberts et al 2015)

¡ Facebook friends

¡ Spending and trending – ‘Buy Nothing Day’

¡ A book about the way in which the internet is changing our brain structure

¡ Guilt free brands and ethical clothing

¡ Social media marketing

Each double spread ends with a task, often thoughtful and reflective.

Task 1Look at the painting on the next slide.

a. Describe the young woman in the painting. Where is she? What is she doing?

b. What is the woman thinking about?

c. Write the first paragraph of a story about this young woman.

Eveline/James JoyceShe sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains, and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.

Literature outside EFL

¡ The hospital poetry of U. A. Fanthorpe

¡ Nurses’ Poetry: Expanding the Literatureand Medicine Canon

¡ In Brief: A Literature Seminar in Clinical Medical Education

¡ Light to the Mind: Literature in theMedical Spanish Course

¡ The Nineteenth Century’s Obsession with Medicine: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

Literature and Medicine: William Carlos Williams’ The Use of Force.

Mention of “The Use of Force” almost amounts to a club handshake among medical humanists. The story’s importance lies in the way it succinctly brings into focus a whole cluster of everyday dilemmas that characterize the medical encounter. The tension that arises between a doctor, a child who won’t open her mouth for a throat exam, and the child’s two parents opens up discussion of medical authority, bedside manners, assignment of medical responsibility, doctor-patient dialogue, children’s rights and fear as a factor in treatment.

(Hawkins & McEntyre, 189)

Task 2: TransplantsWhich body parts have been successfully

transplanted to date?

Turn to your neighbour and list as many as you can.

The Body

He said, “Listen: you say you can’t hear well and your back hurts. Your body won’t stop reminding you of your ailing existence. Would you like to do something about it?’

This half-dead old carcass?” I said. “sure. What?”

“How about trading it in and getting something new?”

POUNDS OF FLESHThe rich go shopping for body parts –the poor and the dead provide. By Fay Weldon

"When human tissue is an investment opportunity for Richard Branson," writes Donna Dickenson, "you know it's become just as much an object of commerce as mobile phones, CDs or train tickets. Virgin's decision in February 2007 to set up a new business in umbilical cord blood banking is just another example of body shopping.”

Dickenson's alarm is justified. Body parts have become big business. In Body Shopping she describes a science-fiction world that turns out to be the one we are living in. The rich go shopping for body parts; the poor and the dead provide them. The nice, kind man in the white clinician's coat turns out to be a ruthless body robber.

Review of Body Shopping: The Economy Fuelled by Flesh and Blood by Donna Dickenson

Relevance – not preaching

¡ A Summer’s Reading (Bernard Malamud)

¡ “I actually like the minimalistic EMT approach. Just to point you in the right direction, and not stuff it down your throat as some of the things they do now at school tend to be. Oh well, I guess it's not popular anymore.”

Literature and abstract concepts

Use of metaphor, symbol, image

Develops symbolic and abstract thinking

Wolfe (2004); Picken (2007)

Task 3Literature and response

Read the poem Returning, we hear the

larks on your handout. Then turn to your

neighbour and discuss it briefly.

Returning, we hear the larks

Types of response

Aesthetic vs. efferent reading

(Louise Rosenblatt)

Reading as a transaction with the text

The learner speaksWhen you read, it’s like you’re finding out something … the challenges that happen in people’s lives… for you to see, for you to learn from it… Like some people they put theirself in unnecessary situations, like getting on drugs or mixing in some world that they don’t know … and then later on they can’t just walk away out of it. [You read] to make sure that you don’t put yourself in that kind of position. (Duncan 2012:175)

Sam: Should a teacher use literature as part of teaching a language B? From your perspective as learners?

Student A: It offers something more interesting than short extracts about the weather or how to order things from a restaurant.

Student B: (…) and it makes learning the language different. It changes the subject.

Sam: Ok how does it change the subject?

Student B: Well, rather than talking about the weather you are talking about Master and Margarita in Russian, it’s talking about whether God exists and Jesus and the devil being in Moscow, it’s more interesting than the weather.

Educational reasons¡ Literature helps us reclaim the classroom as a site for

discussing values

¡ Education is about who we want our learners to be

¡ Dealing with values in a non-didactic way, from a safe distance

¡ Developing abstract concepts

¡ Eliciting a response

Psychological reasons¡ Secondary worlds

¡ Importance of flow

¡ Connection with the complexity of reading

¡ Centrality of narrative

¡ Ubiquity of literature

¡ Language play

Secondary WorldsPresent in every human being are two desires, a desire to know the truth about the primary world, the given world outside ourselves in which we are born, live, love, hate and die, and the desire to make new secondary worlds of our own or, if we cannot make them ourselves, to share in the secondary worlds of those who can.

W. H. Auden

The Secondary Worlds of the Gaming Community

The Secondary Worlds of Fanfiction (fanfiction.net)

The Secondary Worlds of Fanfiction (fanfiction.net)

Secondary WorldsWhat really happens (when a reader engages with a text) is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Flow and Secondary Worlds¡ The sense of effortless action they feel in moments

that stand out as the best in their lives.

¡ Players living in a ‘self contained universe’

¡ Flow tends to occur when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable.

M. Csikszentmihályi

Why is flow important?

¡ Flow matters because the quantity of reading matters

¡ Reading as a complex cognitive skill requiring huge amounts of practice

¡ This practice is important for the very basic elements of reading: to automatise word recognition

¡ Importance of vast amounts of exposure(see Paran 1996)

Superiority of reading to listening or viewing¡ More language can be processed

¡ Reading rates for English L1 readers – ca. 300 wpm; speaking rates are normally about half, and even lower in films.

Anderson, Wilson and Fielding (1988), in Cunningham and Stanovich (1998)

% Independent reading minutes per day

Words read per year

90 21.1 1.823,000

50 4.6 282,000

10 0.1 8000

THE MATTHEW EFFECT

For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.

(Matthew 25:29)

The importance of narrative“That’s how people live, Milt” – Michael Antonious again, still kindly, gently – “by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? ‘Tell me a story.’ That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.”

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

The ubiquity of literatureYou stand like a Gulliver on some rocky outcrop while thousands of feet below Dinky-toy ships drift towards a Lego-sized settlement surrounded by emerald green fields the size of postage stamps.

I am chauffeured in a sleek green 1932 Studebaker, brought up from the underground museum. I’m not denying I feel a bit self-conscious, looking most unlike Jay Gatsby reclining on the leather upholstery in my Helly Hansen jacket and walking boots.

(BA High Life Magazine, March 2012)

Darkness behind Spacey’s story… At this time, when we are interrogating the behaviour of male predators everywhere, perhaps it’s worth asking how much evil starts with an angry, aroused man waving a belt at a cowering child? W H Auden got it right in his poem September 1, 1939:

“I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn/ Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.”https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/andrew-marr-give-the-fishsmoker-the-park-keeper-and-the-navvy-the-artistic-platform-they-deserve-a3687866.html

The Loch Ness Monster’s Song/ Edwin Morgan

Sssnnnwhuffffll?Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl?Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl.Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl –gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm.Hovoplodok – doplodovok – plovodokot-doplodokosh?Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok!Zgra kra gka fok!Grof grawff gahf?Gombl mbl bl –blm plm,blm plm,blm plm,blp.

Psychological reasons¡ Secondary worlds

¡ Importance of flow

¡ Connection with the complexity of reading

¡ Centrality of narrative

¡ Ubiquity of literature

¡ Language Play

Task 4Look at the other side of your handout

and the poem The Wheel.

With your neighbour(s) prepare a group

reading of the poem.

Reading aloud

Linguistic reasons¡Literature is written to be read aloud

¡Literature lends itself to repeated readings

¡Literature lends itself to learning by heart

¡Literature is written with the intention that the reader will finish reading

¡You don’t always have to understand everything

Task 5

The DanceIn Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermesse,

the dancers go round, they go round and

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound)

their hips and their bellies off balance

to turn them. Kicking and rolling about

the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those

shanks must be sound to bear up under such

rollicking measures, prance as they dance

in Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermesse.

Pedagogical reasons¡ Using literature allows you to teach what you like

¡ Greater variety of possible activities

¡ Using literature provides a better opportunity to incorporate other cultural knowledge

Passion and personal preference¡ ‘What made it very good? My passion for the author, and my

personal stance regards the work. (…) I managed to at some point transmit that to the students’. (C9F, E)

¡ ‘And this year I did Capital which I really loved, I do think my passion for that work transferred on to the group’(A1E)

¡ ‘My love is for French and French literature so it gives me the change to kind of go back to the things that I love as well’. (B1F)

¡ ‘Last year really the main text that we set was one I knew well and liked, Master and Margarita, because I had studied it at university, I knew it very well and could talk about it at length’ (B-R,S)

¡ ‘When a teacher enjoys something and is passionate about something then that comes across and is infectious and that’s why I think it is important that the teacher knows and really likes the text that they are doing’. (B3F,S)

The teacher speaks

My goal when teaching is for students to gain language skills… I enjoy teaching short stories more than non-literary texts… I’m doing a lot of non-literary texts in other sections and most of the time when you can’t find the synonym in English that they would grasp. You find yourself giving the French for it, and that solves the problem. So you have very little to grasp, to, I don’t know how to put this… there are very few handles, so to say, while in a literary text you have so many ways of tackling it, of coming up with activities. It’s so much richer. (Greene 2017)

The role of the teacher¡ Learners’ attitudes to literature in EFL was strongly

influenced by the approaches to teaching literature that they reported experiencing in the classroom. (Schmidt 2004)

¡ The amount of training in using/teaching literature on their ITE programme had an influence on their attitudes and on their reported activities when using literature in the classroom. (Duncan and Paran 2017)

Pedagogical reasons¡ Using literature allows you to teach what you like

¡ Greater variety of possible activities

¡ Using literature provides a better opportunity to incorporate other cultural knowledge

Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical

fallacies is the notion that a person learns only

the particular thing he is studying at the time.

John Dewey (1938)