Local literature:

Brandes (1986:12) claims that:

“Learning what is meaningful and relevant depends partly on what is taught and partly

on how it is taught.”

With the emphasis on what Brandes considers, we believe that if teaching

literature fails to achieve its goals, it is not merely the fault either of literature as a

subject or the weaknesses of the learners, but rather of approaches, methods and

strategies used by teachers and educators to handle the huge bulk of literature. Thus,

developing methodologies for teaching literature comes to be a very urgent

recommendation on the part of both researchers and teachers to make the process

more effective and consistent.

. Miliani (2003:46) argues that:

One should not forget that if we are to establish relationships with literature, it is

through reading. Unfortunately, this skill has been and is still given rough handling by

the educational system, society at large and the learner himself.

And he found out that:

developing methods and pedagogies to integrate efficient reading skills and

strategies in literature course seems to be a very urgent requirement. Therefore,

Reading remains the only means and the most efficient skill to enhance the students’

capacities in coping with the bulk of literature.

 According to Long (1986:42) “The teaching of literature is an arid business unless

there is a response, and even negative responses can create an interesting classroom

situation”

He found out that: reading instruction should not seek to control the reader’s

experience but to facilitate the reader’s own structuring of that experience. Hence, the

teacher would assume a role of an enabler for the transmission of knowledge. This

implies motivating students by selecting appealing works to which they can respond

emotionally and linguistically in order to render reading a literary text an enjoyable and

responsive experience. Moreover, the reader-response approach stresses the necessity

and the pedagogical value of developing the students’ critical abilities and awareness,

Mililani (2003:2) states that:

“ Thus, the course (of literature) becomes a simple transposition of the teacher’s

impressions and feelings to the learner towards a literary work, and not an intellectual

exercise for the latter who should seek and discover meaning by himself with the means

and strategies provided by the teacher.

(Ueda, 2003). I believed that teachers used common

teaching strategies to address some inevitable problems in the teacher and students

relationship and

to fulfill the task of delivering the knowledge to the learners. This particular condition

manifests the

theory of teacher-behavior which proposes that interaction between the teacher and the

learners is
of importance to have a meaningful collaboration

He found out that: it revealed that

lecture or lecture-discussion was the most likely used by the teachers while the
teachers’ FGD
results showed that they used most of the time dramatization or role playing and

lecture .
Carter and Long (1991) state there are three models of teaching literature: 1)

The Cultural Model which is a traditional approach of teaching literature where learners

need to discover and infer the social, political, literary and historical context of a specific

text. It reveals the universality of thoughts and ideas and learners are encouraged to

understand different cultures and ideologies in relation to their own. This model views

literature as a source of facts and it is teacher centered where the teacher passes

knowledge and information to the students. 2) The Language Model which is an

approach that offers learners an opportunity to access a text in a systematic and

methodical way. This approach allows teachers to apply strategies used in language

teaching such as cloze procedure, prediction exercises, jumbled sentences, summary

writing, creative writing and role play to deconstruct literary texts in order to serve

specific linguistic goals. Savvidou (2004) asserts that students engage with the text

purely for linguistic practice and literature is used mechanistically to provide a series of

language activities. 3) The Personal Growth Model which is an approach that focus on

the personal development of the students including emotions and personal

characteristics. It requires students to relate and respond to the themes and issues

Moody (1983) cited by Diana Hwang & Amin Embi (2007) explains that the

importance of an approach is to “provide a framework, or sequence of operations to be

used when we come to actualities”. Based on the definitions above, it is clear that an
approach will influence teaching strategies. There are many approaches that can be

employed to teach literature to below average group such as the information-based

approach, language-based approach, personal response approach, paraphrastic

approach and moral-philosophical approach. Stylistic approach is excluded in this

research as learners require a degree of language competence even before they

participate in learning using the approach and therefore it is more likely to cater for

intermediate and advance learners and not applicable for less proficient group.

Maley and Duff (1990) insist that the primary aim of this approach is “quite simply to

use literary texts as a resource for stimulating language activities”. With the use of

language-based approaches, the focus shifted to the learner, the reading process and

creating language awareness in the learners.

Conclusion: In fact, teaching literature at university has become too much

concerned with vocabulary development and comprehension in which the literary text is

used as a sample for grammar exercises and paraphrasing. Moreover, the teacher of

literature enjoys a place of a dominant know-all master who supplies ready made

interpretations and views usually taken from writers and critics about literary works In

order to reconsider the effective role of literature in TEFL classes, it is highly advisable

to develop an adequate pedagogy which will assume a place for the teacher to lead the

learners towards an independent ability to read and appreciate literary texts as well as

to enhance their language skills and cultural awareness about the target language.

The incorporation of literature component in English into the English Language

syllabus is not a recent phenomenon. Supposedly, after ten years in the syllabus,
teachers should be able to teach literature effectively so that the objectives outlined by

the Curriculum Development Centre can be achieved. Yet, the incorporation of the

literature component is still argued and debated amongst teachers, students,

researchers, parents as well as the policy makers. This study allows one to see and

understand how the Literature Component in English is taught in rural schools. More

prominently, it reveals the fact that the teachers who are at the front line of teaching

face great difficulties in teaching literature to less proficient students. However, they

have to adapt all the approaches and strategies to suit the needs of this group of

students so that the aims and the objectives of the Literature Component in English will

be attended to and hence, successfully accomplished and not a mere futile exercise.