Educational Perspectives

Abstract

This chapter deals with research into literature in education, under four headings: curriculum and syllabus; assessment; literature in the classroom; and literature and intercultural education. As we have seen in Part 1, a key question in teaching literature has always been: which texts to study, in which order, and what the rationale for the use of literature in education might be. This has tended to be a particularly acute problem for the second language classroom, where the desire to provide motivating material for an individual lesson (the ‘springboard’ cliché) often seems to override longer-term curricular views, one text following another with possibly thematic coherence, but little obvious or thought through justification in terms of developing language proficiency and/ or literary competence. Thus Brumfit (1981), in an early but still largely unrealised proposal, argues for a more conscious and principled approach to literature use in language classrooms, with sequencing decisions to be based on considerations such as: linguistic level; cultural level; length; pedagogical role (linked themes would be included here); genre representation (not just short stories!); classic status or relevance (could be a motivating factor).