Judicious Exploitation of Literature in Language Teaching
Lok Raj Regmi
Literature, a mode of communication and one of the manifestations of language, has been described as a content –rich material and a model of creative language in use. It is linguistically rich, culturally embedded, and pedagogically useful material. However, the use of literature in language teaching has ever remained debated whether it could contribute for both language development and aesthetic purpose. Realizing the very issue, this study presents how literature contributes in teaching and learning of different language skills and how it is used to teach for aesthetic purpose. To address the issue, various theoretical and empirical literatures were reviewed and analysed to draw the conclusions. The findings of the study show that literature is supportive for language development, for example enhancing different language skills. Moreover, it is found to be an object for aesthetic purpose, for example, responding to the literary text using different lenses. Further, the study suggests that the existing views and essence of using literature (i.e. teaching language through literature and study of literature from language point of view) should be extended to teaching literature for the sake of aesthetics. It is the judicious teaching of literature that acknowledges literature as an instrument as well as an object. The teaching of literature can expose students to interact with the messages existed in literary texts along with perceiving the textual information. While reading literature, students can have interaction with different characters, their roles, their psychological status, and the way how these characters perceive this world, as a result, students by using the diverse perspectives can identify the realities and describe them. In this sense, the teaching of literature is found to be quite relevant for aesthetic purpose.
