Epilogue: Literature and Language Learning in the EFL Classroom

Abstract

In the early part of the 20th century, in many parts of the world, learning a foreign language meant a close study of the canonical literature in that language. In the period from the 1940s to the 1970s, as the learning of a foreign language, especially the learning of English internationally, literature came to be seen as extraneous to language teaching and to everyday communicative needs and as something of an elitist pursuit and was replaced by more functional concerns. However, in the 1980s and 1990s the growth of communicative language teaching methods led to a reconsideration of the place of literature in the language classroom with recognition of the primary authenticity of literary texts and of the fact that more imaginative and representational uses of language could be embedded alongside more referentially utilitarian concerns. There continue to be some divisions, differences of opinion and distinctions in theory and in practice between those principally concerned with ‘relevance’ and ‘utility’ (mainly language teachers) and those principally concerned with literature, culture and ‘significance’ (mainly literature teachers), limiting in the process opportunities for bridge-building teaching and learning. In the 21st century, however, it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain such divisions, as education through English is re-conceptualized as the study of a wide variety of texts.