Literature and language teaching 1986–2006: a review

Abstract

For Christopher Brumfit (1940–2006)The teaching of literature can thus be seen as a means of introducing learners to such a serious view of our world, of initiating them in the process of defining themselves through contact with others’ experience. How it is best done, what the relationship between ‘reading’ and ‘literature’ needs to be for the greatest number of people to be led to literature, exactly what books are appropriate at what levels – these are questions for teachers to address. But the seriousness of the enterprise should not be doubted. It is only when these reading processes are centrally addressed as processes and when the debate moves away from content to what we do with literary texts, that genuine literary issues can be addressed.(Brumfit 2001: 92)