The Use of Literature in the Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract

The present study focuses on the use of literary texts in teaching Arabic and English as foreign languages. It is part of an action research project that also includes the design of a literature-based syllabus for teaching foreign language skills at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. The project deals also with piloting the materials and investigating the attitudes of the learners towards them. In particular, this study investigates the use of short stories and poems in the foreign language classroom. It shows how Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant can be effectively used for teaching some syntactic constructions such as exclamation sentences. The study also explores the use of Shawqi’s al-thaʿlab wa al-dīk (i.e. The Fox and the Roaster) in teaching vocabulary and grammatical number in Arabic. Finally, the study uses Bahjat’s Ghurāb ʾibnaī ʾādam (i.e. The Crow of the Two Sons of Adam) to teach language skills and to introduce some multimodal activities such as adaptation and digital storytelling. The study has concluded that literature in general and short stories and poems in particular provide the learners with motivating resources that can assist them to develop their language skills and enhance their communicative and interpretive competence.