Language and Literature: A symbiotic relationship Teaching language throughliterature: Problems and Principles (Part 1) [Archives:2003/640/Education]

Dr. Damodar Thakur
Professor and Chairman
Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Sana'a
Some introductory observations
Until about the middle of the twentieth century, teaching English in colleges and universities almost everywhere meant the teaching of English literature. After the Second World War, nearly all countries colonized by Britain gained political freedom one after another and, when formulating their educational policy, all these countries had to make up their mind about the place of English in their curriculum. This more or less coincided with the emergence of linguistics as a subject of great importance all over the world and under the umbrella of linguistics, psychology and certain other related disciplines, a great deal of thinking and rethinking was done about how best the third world countries could teach English in view of their limited resources. After the initial hostility, nearly all countries decided to teach English for the purpose of augmenting their economy through science and technology. They all felt, however, that what they needed was the English language and not English literature. Research done in the area of English for Special Purposes provided a new direction to English language teaching and the general feeling was that during the first few years the learners of English as a second or a foreign language should master the basic language skills and then they should specialize in the ESP related to their profession or ambition in life. The teaching of literature was considered an academic luxury. Universities which lacked a progressive outlook, continued, however, with the teaching of literature in their traditional way, thinking that it was too much of a bother changing over to the new philosophy of teaching English. Because of their mistaken sense of validity, many other policy makers thought that teaching literature the way it had been done for decades was the only sensible thing to do by way of teaching English. It would be in order here, therefore, to examine why, if at all, English literature should be taught in countries where the need of the hour is only to teach functional English.

Reasons for teaching literature
1) It is sometimes assumed that the materials and strategies for teaching the basic language skills need not be emotively sustaining or imaginatively exciting. This assumption has been one of the main reasons for the partial failure of most of our language teaching programmes. The problem with many of our language teaching drills and exercises is that they are lifeless, dull, dry and puerile. Little do many of us realize when designing our substitution tables, fill-in-the-blank exercises and so on that they are meant not to be tried on mechanically driven robots but on infinitely complex living and loving individuals. Existential philosophers tell us that the greatest problem of the man of today is his feeling of alienation.
He feels lonely even when he is in the middle of a crowd. He feels he is emotionally starving, spiritually suffocated and intellectually crest-fallen. Like characters in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, he feels that he exists no doubt but he hardly ever lives. One can disagree with this agonizing view of life and say that the existential philosophers' jaundiced view of life is an act of exaggeration and over-generalization, and that life is an opportunity and not a curse. Whether life is an endless drudgery, as some believe, or a blessing as some other do, it cannot be denied that we all welcome something that is emotionally exciting and intellectually elevating and so, if we make use of literary flashes to illuminate our otherwise dull and dry drills and exercises, learners will find learning to be an enlivening and energizing experience. Those who advocate an affectively-based methodology of teaching, Simon et al (1972), Curran (1976), Gattegno (1976), Moscowitz (1978), and Stevick (1980, 1982), for example, argue that teaching must engage the whole person inside the learner in the sense that it must address itself to all the deeper and more abiding needs of the learner. The apparent, localized need of a language learner in the classroom may be only to acquire the linguistic means of communication being focused in that lesson, but his unstated and enduring need underlying this apparent need is to obtain from whatever he does a sense of exhilaration and illumination, a sense of extension and augmentation. In language learning, this can be achieved only by integrating language with literature. One or two examples of how literature can illuminate language teaching may not be out of place here. Suppose a teacher is teaching defining and non-defining relative clauses in English. By way of illustrating these two types of clauses, he will in all probability use, as teachers of grammar nearly always do, flat and insipid examples like the following:
(1) The man whom you met yesterday is a cobbler.
(2) London, which is the capital of the United Kingdom, is very crowded

But if he has the knack for teaching language through literature, he can give enlivening examples like the following:1
(1) Blue are the hills that are far away.
(2) The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool. (Balzac)
(3) Someone who is born in a stable is not necessarily a horse.
(4) He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches. (Shaw)

For teaching punctuation, most teachers would tend to use lifeless sentences like the following as illustrations:
If you go there, you will certainly meet him.

But if a teacher wants to teach language through literature, he can use illustrations like the following:
(1) A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you cannot expect an apostle to look out.
(2) If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry. (Chekov)
(3) Ah, don't say you agree with me. When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong. (Wilde)
(4) If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.

A teacher teaching sentence patterns in English but not particularly interested in making his examples enlivening and attractive would tend to give illustrations taken from the day-to-day facts of life. If he has to teach the S+V pattern, for example, he would use boring illustrations like the following.
Birds are flying.
Dogs are barking.

But if he wants to teach language through literature, he would give examples like the following:
Minor poets imitate; great poets steal. (Eliot)
Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy. (Maugham)
A poem should not mean but be. (MacLeish)

For teaching the S+V+O pattern, he would give examples like the following:
Your tale, sir, would cure deafness. (Shakespeare)
No philosopher could endure his toothache patiently.
(Shakespeare)
Faith will move mountains.
Empty vessels make the greatest sound.
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history. (George Eliot)

For teaching the S+V+C pattern, an unimaginative teacher would give examples like “The cow is a four-footed animal.” But an imaginative teacher would illustrate this pattern with examples like the following:
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car. (Tynon)
Prose is words in their best order; poetry is the best words in the best order. (Coleridge)

In my view, a teacher should, for making his language teaching inspiring, select examples with a literary flavor, examples which, because of the moving truths that they contain, suddenly illuminate the learning and teaching atmosphere like a flash of lightning in a dark night. Oscar Wilde once said, “If a woman can't make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.” In a like manner, I would like to say that if a teacher cannot make his teaching interesting, he is not a teacher; he is only an unwelcome wage earner who has mistakenly drifted into a profession incompatible with the very essence of his personality.
The type and quality of literature to be used as material for language teaching will depend on the age and the cultural background of the learner and on the level at which language teaching has to be done. Fairy tales, for example, will be useful for language lessons for children; parables, anecdotes, simple short stories, etc for intermediate learners and unabridged classics for advanced learners.
To be continued next Monday
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