Abstract
With a purpose of investigating if a book club creates spaces for students to experience personal involvement through the fruition of art, this paper discusses the book club experience of the novel “Wonder” in a group of 18 upper-intermediate English students. The data were collected through 6 personal responses from each student; then, a quantitative analysis of the Halliday’s types of processes (2004) and a qualitative categorization concluded that they have shown personal involvement with the novel through their lexicon-grammatical choices. As an outcome, in 71% of the answers, students expressed themselves by verbal and mental cognitive functions, sharing personal beliefs and point of views that they had while interacting with the novel. Such answers exposed how relationships with the social-cultural background of the student leads to personal involvement with a literary text. It makes possible to conclude that once learning a language through reading, literature becomes a key point to activate the process of fruition of art and lead to a meaningful and unique process.
Highlights
Instigating second language learners to read, especially literary texts, can be a tiring process
Several concerns and pre-judgments arise when students are asked to read a literary text (AKYAY, 2009 TAKASE, 2007): the fear of not being able to understand the meaning by not knowing all the vocabulary, the fact that reading a novel can be time consuming, that due to heavy workload of other subjects they do not have spare time for reading, that students read in English only because they have to, and so on
Such studies moved from an idea of literacy as an ability and technique to be acquired, to a notion of literacy having meaning once studied within a sociocultural practice context (GEE, 1999)
Summary
Instigating second language learners to read, especially literary texts, can be a tiring process. Even when focusing on a specific individual, reading may vary depending on the context someone is inserted. Since the end of the XX century, researchers have reflected upon literacy and the usage of literature in English language teaching. Such studies moved from an idea of literacy as an ability and technique to be acquired, to a notion of literacy having meaning once studied within a sociocultural practice context (GEE, 1999). Such studies moved from an idea of literacy as an ability and technique to be acquired, to a notion of literacy having meaning once studied within a sociocultural practice context (GEE, 1999). Street (2014) reaffirms how power relations are involved in praising specific types of literacy in each context and why some of them are focused instead of others
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