Critical Necessities: Using Literary texts in the EFL Classroom

1. Critical Necessities: Using Literary texts in the EFL Classroom Amos Paran Institute of Education, University of London

2. Reasons for using literary texts Psychological reasons: building on the human common ground Educational reasons: doing what we can to educate the learners Pedagogical reasons: responding to our wishes and wants as teachers Linguistic reasons: building on what people do with language and with literature

3. The ubiquity of literature You stand like a Gulliver on some rocky outcrop while thousands of feet below Dinky-toy ships drift towards a Lego-sized settlement surrounded by emerald green fields the size of postage stamps. I am chauffeured in a sleek green 1932 Studebaker, brought up from the underground museum. I’m not denying I feel a bit self-conscious, looking most unlike Jay Gatsby reclining on the leather upholstery in my Helly Hansen jacket and walking boots. (BA High Life Magazine, March 2012)

4. Secondary Worlds Present in every human being are two desires, a desire to know the truth about the primary world, the given world outside ourselves in which we are born, live, love, hate and die, and the desire to make new secondary worlds of our own or, if we cannot make them ourselves, to share in the secondary worlds of those who can. W. H. Auden

5. The Secondary Worlds of the Gaming Community

6. The Secondary Worlds of Fanfiction

7. The Secondary Worlds of Fanfiction

8. Secondary Worlds What really happens (when a reader engages with a text) is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub- creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. J. R. R. Tolkien

9. Flow and Secondary Worlds • The sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. • Players living in a ‘self contained universe’ • Flow tends to occur when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable. M. Csikszentmihályi

10. Flow matters becausequantity matters • Reading as a complex cognitive skill • Written language vs. spoken language • Importance of vast amounts of exposure (see Paran 1996)

11. The importance of narrative “That’s how people live, Milt”– Michael Antonious again, still kindly, gently –“by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? ‘Tell me a story.’ That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.” Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

12. Psychological reasons • Ubiquity of literature • Language play • Secondary worlds • Importance of flow • Connection with the complexity of reading • Centrality of narrative

13. Task 1

14. Eveline/James Joyce She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains, and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.

15. The Prohibited PARSNIP • Politics • Alcohol • Religion • Sex • Narcotics • Isms • Pork

16. Talking Points

17. Literature outside EFL • The hospital poetry of U. A. Fanthorpe • Nurses’ Poetry: Expanding the Literature and Medicine Canon • In Brief: A Literature Seminar in Clinical Medical Education • Light to the Mind: Literature in the Medical Spanish Course • The Nineteenth Century’s Obsession with Medicine: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

18. Literature and Medicine Mention of “The Use of Force” almost amounts to a club handshake among medical humanists. The story’s importance lies in the way it succinctly brings into focus a whole cluster of everyday dilemmas that characterize the medical encounter. The tension that arises between a doctor, a child who won’t open her mouth for a throat exam, and the child’s two parents opens up discussion of medical authority, bedside manners, assignment of medical responsibility, doctor-patient dialogue, children’s rights and fear as a factor in treatment. (Hawkins & McEntyre, 189)

19. Task 2: Transplants Which body parts have been successfully transplanted to date? Turn to your neighbour and list as many as you can.

20. The Body He said, ‘Listen: you say you can’t hear well and your back hurts. Your body won’t stop reminding you of your ailing existence. Would you like to do something about it?’ ‘This half-dead old carcass?’ I said. ‘Sure. What?’ ‘How about trading it in and getting something new?’ (Hanif Kureishi)

21. POUNDS OF FLESHThe rich go shopping for body parts - the poor and the dead provide. By Fay Weldon "When human tissue is an investment opportunity for Richard Branson," writes Donna Dickenson, "you know it's become just as much an object of commerce as mobile phones, CDs or train tickets. Virgin's decision in February 2007 to set up a new business in umbilical cord blood banking is just another example of body shopping.” Dickenson's alarm is justified. Body parts have become big business. In Body Shopping she describes a science-fiction world that turns out to be the one we are living in. The rich go shopping for body parts; the poor and the dead provide them. The nice, kind man in the white clinician's coat turns out to be a ruthless body robber. (Review of Body Shopping: The Economy Fuelled by Flesh and Bloodby Donna Dickenson)

22. Literature and abstract concepts Use of metaphor, symbol, image Develops symbolic and abstract thinking Wolfe (2004); Picken (2007)

23. Task 3 Literature and response Read the poem Returning, we hear the larks on your handout. Then turn to your neighbour and discuss it briefly.

24. Returning, we hear the larks

25. Types of response Aesthetic vs. efferent reading (Louise Rosenblatt) Reading as a transaction with the text Can we rescue literature from reading

26. Educational reasons • Literature as a site for discussing values • Dealing with values in a non-didactic way, from a safe distance • Developing abstract concepts • Eliciting a response

27. Pedagogical reasons • Using literature allows you to teach what you like • Greater variety of possible activities • Using literature provides a better opportunity to incorporate other cultural knowledge

28. Task 4 Look at the other side of your handout and the poem The Wheel. With your neighbour(s) prepare a group reading of the poem.

29. Reading aloud

30. Linguistic reasons • Literature is written to be read aloud • Literature lends itself to repeated readings • Literature lends itself to learning by heart • Literature is written with the intention that the reader will finish reading • You don’t always have to understand everything

31. Task 5

32. The Dance In Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermesse, the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles tipping their bellies (round as the thick- sided glasses whose wash they impound) their hips and their bellies off balance to turn them. Kicking and rolling about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those shanks must be sound to bear up under such rollicking measures, prance as they dance in Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermesse. William Carlos Williams.

33. Only Connect. E.M. Forster, Howards End

34. Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time. John Dewey (1938)