Topic/Subject area: Choice of text
Author: Anne-Brit Fenner, Cand.philol, Department of Education, University of Bergen
Introduction
The project presented in this article is based on teaching English as a foreign language in a Norwegian mixed ability classroom of 14-year-old learners. For a little over a year the students had been working according to principles of learner autonomy. The article will first discuss the importance of literary texts as cultural artefacts in foreign language learning. This will be done from a hermeneutical point of view, defined widely as “‘the science of interpretation’: the understanding of texts and the problems of understanding” (Newton 1997: 45). Secondly, approaches to literary texts in the classroom will be looked at, and I will argue for a dialogic approach, which includes dialogue between reader and text, between the students and between students and teacher. Finally the article presents classroom work with a specific literary text, The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde. Throughout, the aim of the classroom work has been to raise the learners’ cultural and intercultural awareness, and awareness of learning in addition to learning a language.
Changing views on literature in the foreign language classroom
Foreign language learning in the classroom depends heavily on written and oral texts, texts which are read, listened to or spoken. If we go back a century in the history of foreign language teaching, authentic texts played an all-important part, especially in the teaching of Greek and Latin. With these texts as media, the students read, analysed, translated, and learnt grammar, and the process was, in addition to learning the foreign language, intended to promote the student's development as a human being, his or her educational development or ‘Bildung’. Now, after decades of foreign language teaching from constructed textbook texts at lower school levels, authentic text has come into focus again. It is, however, the factual text that has been focused upon for young learners in many countries rather than the literary text. Sometimes the reason has been that textbooks were meant to reflect reality: foreign language learning was supposed to be based on real life situations, especially the reality of young learners. In my view it is a misconception that ‘real life’ for teenagers necessarily means that 14 textbooks have to reflect their everyday lives outside school, as this seems a very limited presentation of the foreign culture.
I am not disputing that textbook texts about teenagers in a foreign culture have a role to play in foreign language teaching of adolescents. The problem is that these texts are rarely authentic: very often they have not come out of the language community of the specific culture in question, but have been constructed by textbook writers from the learners’ native culture (Fenner and Newby 2000). If we regard language as an expression of culture as well as communication, specifically constructed texts will not necessarily reflect the foreign culture. Authenticity is emphasised in many foreign language classrooms, but more often than not, the authentic texts used are texts presenting facts from the foreign culture, often through newspapers or the Internet. Especially as far as teaching and learning culture is concerned, realia texts play an important part. Literature is, to a much lesser extent, used as material for language learning and for developing linguistic and cultural awareness at this level. There might be several reasons for this, some of which will be considered here.
Behaviourism, and later structuralism, resulted in reducing language learning to a near science, with language being represented as a set of techniques that could be learnt, and where answers were correct or incorrect. Great emphasis was put on fill-in exercises and short dialogues, trying to create ‘good habits’ which one hoped would be reproduced automatically when a specific situation required action and speech. Literature had little place within such instrumentalist frames of foreign language teaching as it did not focus on specific practical, utilitarian situations of communication. The study of literature was left to higher levels of education for students who specialised in languages. The basic view was that students had to learn the language first before they were able to cope with texts that were not regarded as useful in everyday communication.
Another reason is that the view of culture changed during the latter part of the 20th century from ‘high’ culture to everyday culture or from a ‘culture of the elite’ to ‘common culture’ (Fenner and Newby 2000: 143). Textbooks were now meant to reflect the everyday lives of ordinary people, not literary characters: literature was out, football was in. A reductionist view of the purpose of learning a foreign language was prevalent, and students did not need to read literature because they were not taught a foreign language in order to talk to members of the foreign community about literature.
Communicative language teaching has often emphasised the spoken language and many teachers have been under the misconception that the main concern of communicative teaching is oral language. Communication has primarily been 15 interpreted as talking to people, and classroom texts and tasks have focused upon examples of dialogue in given situations. There seem to have been two main types of dialogue in foreign language textbooks, serving two different purposes. One kind has been dialogues based on models of speech conventions with very little content and only ritualised meaning. The other has been short dialogues to introduce specific topics, which have then been expanded upon in further texts.
A tendency in the former type of dialogue has been a lack of awareness of the fact that dialogue is not only dependent on a minimum of two participants, but also on having a topic to talk about, what Ricoeur calls the third participant (Ricoeur 1992). Forced dialogue in the classroom without a topic that the learners can engage in dies out quickly. Without personal involvement, it is doubtful whether the learners acquire the skills that they need when required to use the speech conventions that were the objectives of this type of dialogue.
The latter type of dialogue, which is common in most Scandinavian foreign language textbooks, has been regarded as an easy way to introduce a topic to weak learners, in addition to giving examples of speech conventions. The main problem with this kind of dialogue has been that it is inauthentic and deals very scantily and artificially with the given topic (Aase, Fenner, Little and Trebbi 2000). Many foreign language teachers have, as a result, come to regard weak learners as incapable of coping with other text genres, including literary genres, and these learners are, therefore, rarely required to read or listen to authentic text. Their knowledge and awareness of the foreign culture will consequently be extremely limited.
With regard to literature, there might also be a certain anxiety among teachers of reverting to very traditional teaching methods. In many countries there seems to have been an attempt to get away from curricula weighed down by literary texts, which are often defined as works by ‘great’ authors, and which have been analysed to extremes in many foreign language and mother tongue classrooms. Finally there might even be a misconception that young people are not interested in reading literature, and unless they take a certain interest in what is taught, their motivation for learning will be minimal.
Literature has, on the other hand, always played an important part in the teaching of foreign languages at higher school levels. The main aim has been that students should be acquainted with the works of famous writers and they should learn to analyse literature, which, with the emergence of New Criticism, meant discovering the author’s intention, the ‘meaning’ of the text. Teaching literature in a static society with little diversification might have justified the way literature was taught in the upper secondary foreign language classroom for a long period of time. Learners in a specific social context had perhaps a more uniform way of understanding literary texts. The teacher’s interpretation of a work of literature might not have been so very different from the competent students’ understanding of it, and even if it was, they had to learn the teacher’s interpretation or what Sørensen calls the ‘teacher’s text’, and reproduce it in exams (Sørensen 1983: 22). Today we live in a dynamic and diverse society with constant changes, and, as teachers, we also find ourselves faced with young people who are not always willing to accept what we might call the teacher’s text, at least not as the ‘truth’.
The role of literature in foreign language learning
Why should literature be important in young people’s foreign language learning? In defence of the literary text a number of arguments will be presented. The first of these is, as briefly stated previously, that the literary text is authentic. Authentic here means that “it is created to fulfil some purpose in the language community in which it was produced” (Little, Devitt and Singleton 1989: 23). Thus the text carries the culture of a specific language community and can give the reader valuable insight into the foreign culture, as well as into the language and form used to express that culture. Literature represents the personal voice of a culture.
Secondly, literature has richer and more diverse semiotics than factual text genres and consequently offers more learning potential. Literary texts are experiments with thought, a dialectic between reality and fantasy. They employ more metaphorical language than other types of text or in Ricoeur’s words: “the metaphor is in the literary language as a producer of meaning” (Ricoeur 1992). Metaphors can be interpreted differently by different readers, and literary language, more than everyday language, consequently provides the ‘space’ where the learners can experience the multiplicity of meaning. This is expressed in the Norwegian National Curriculum for English as follows: “When learners focus on the relationship between form and content and discover that a multiplicity of meaning opens up for different paths to understanding and insight, they will find the scope they need to explore the language” (224)1. Literature gives the learners ample opportunity to explore the multiplicity of language as well as culture when they engage actively in the reading process to discover meaning.
The third point to be made is that literary texts function as models for the learner’s own text production. In Norway language teaching at lower secondary level aims at general language competence and such competence is partly assessed on the learner’s creative text production. Literature presents good models for the learner’s personal writing, content-wise, linguistically, and structurally, and I believe that models of quality are more important than rules in foreign language learning.
Another specific feature of literature is that it is ‘undetermined’ and open (Iser 1991). According to Bakhtin, literary language is not “… represented [] as a unitary, completely finished-off and indisputable language – it is represented… as a living mix of varied and opposing voices…” (Bakhtin 1981). It leaves room for personal interpretation and opinion forming, and thus provides more interesting open spaces than most of the information gap exercises produced by textbook writers within the communicative teaching tradition. This applies as much to the individual’s reading and interpreting processes in a dialogue between text and reader as to the classroom or group discourse that might follow. The narrative text or poem has what Iser and Eco call ‘gaps’ that need to be filled by the reader. Far from everything is expressed within the literary work; the reader has to listen to what the text tells him or her, discover the gaps and try to fill them. Different readers will discover different gaps, and a reading experience is an encounter between what the hermeneutical philosopher Gadamer calls the ‘horizon’ of the text and the reader’s personal ‘horizon’ (Hellesnes 1998: 32). Briefly this means that the reader brings his or her complete experience and pre-knowledge, in Bourdieu’s terms his or her habitus and cultural capital, into the encounter with the text and interprets it from this (Bourdieu 1994: 12-14). Discovering and interpreting the gaps constitute an active dialogue with the text, whether internal or external, dependent on the social context. For the young learner this discovery process is an active and creative part of language learning.
In addition to the above, reading is a communicative experience. It is not so much a matter of hypothesising, as in other aspects of language learning, as it is a matter of being open towards answers to one’s own questions. We have as learners, and indeed as human beings, unconscious or conscious questions and we are constantly looking for answers to our own questions. Literature makes statements, which might turn out to be the answers we are looking for (Hellesnes 1988). If we regard reading as a productive language exercise, where the reader participates with the text in producing meaning, the literary text offers a cultural meeting point. This encounter with the text is a dialogue, which is dialectic and enhances both language competence and cultural competence.
At this point it seems necessary to define how I wish to understand communicative competence. What does a learner know when he or she knows a foreign language? This has been defined in different ways, and some of the definitions can be agreed upon by most language teachers. But, as Wittgenstein argues, we have to be aware of the fact that we do not know exactly what it means to know a language. This is partly due to language not being a static entity, but dynamic and continuously changing. The same applies to cultural competence; culture is also a dynamic force. Encountering a foreign culture is a dialogic process: the learner is influenced by the foreign culture at the same time as he or she is influencing that culture (Foucault 1983). If we pretend to know the exact answers to how to react linguistically in specific communicative situations, we are in danger of reducing language competence to technology (Fairclough, Ricoeur).
We are all, as foreign language teachers, to a certain extent influenced by behaviourism, whether we want to admit it or not, at least when it comes to teaching weak learners. Foreign language textbooks are still full of exercises based on behaviourism, and few of us can honestly say that we never resort to drills. But we have to realise that human communication is not a matter of technique, nor is it a matter of correct or incorrect, although it cannot be denied that right or wrong comes into it. There are no given answers to fit specific situations; most communication is spontaneous. As both Wittgenstein and Habermas claim, only minor parts of language can be reduced to technique. In many classrooms based on communicative teaching, and certainly in many textbooks within this tradition, understanding language has been reduced to an instrumental understanding: that language use is merely a means to obtain certain objectives (Nicolaysen 1997: 102).
Most human communication, however, is non-finite without pre-empted answers. Certain conventions of speech might be learnt in the foreign language classroom, but they might not fit an actual situation, most likely they will not. Knowing a language means to be able to interpret, understand and explore, even at the simplest levels of communication in a foreign language. It depends on the Aristotelian term kairos: being able to assess a specific situation and then analyse the possibilities for action given within the situation (Hellesnes 1988). It is in other words a matter of being aware of and prepared for the unexpected. How to act and what to say in a real situation requires kairos and can only be practised through experience with a diversity of life situations. Literature offers a diversity of examples of how different characters act in different situations of life. They are not examples to be imitated, but they offer a multiplicity of possible actions, which enhance our own experience. Dialogue with different literary texts develops a different kind of competence than traditional language competence. It has more scope, linguistically as well as culturally, and it is an ‘open’ competence making for a wide scope of possible actions because it is not presented as right or wrong. Through literature the learners can experience “how language can be used in different situations, for different purposes, and to varying effect” (Aase, Fenner and Trebbi 2000).
The fact that literature is concerned with identity and self-awareness is another important aspect. Poetic language has a ‘divided reference’ to a real world as well as a fictional world because literary texts are experiments with thought: a dialectic between reality and fantasy. Through reading texts we gain an indirect understanding of the world, and, according to Ricoeur, this is a characteristic of poetic language. Reflections on a text allow the reader to turn interpretations upon him/herself and will consequently result in enhanced understanding and self-awareness (Nicolaysen 1997: 102-104). Young learners in particular are in the middle of a process of establishing their own identity. In literature they find the general represented through the particular. One of the characteristics of the age group is that they are often narcissistic and tend to compare themselves to others. It is easier for them to relate to and identify with particular individuals and situations than with the general. Reading and interpretation is not only understanding a text and looking for meanings, it is also relating to that meaning personally: “… the idea of interpretation adds to the simple idea of meaning that of a meaning for someone. For the agent, interpreting the text of an action is interpreting himself or herself” (Ricoeur 1992). Through the reading of literary texts, within which young people can conduct their search for meanings as well as models, the field is extended, and through the foreign literary text they experience other ways of living in addition to what they have the opportunity to experience within their own culture. Characters, plot, setting, and theme in the narrative text, the drama or the poem offer them possibilities to widen their perspectives, their view of self, and their cultural capital. Through the foreign culture they can also achieve a useful and necessary outside perspective of themselves and their own culture. The literary text as an artefact of the foreign culture provides the mirror in which they can see themselves reflected; it provides an outside to their inside (Fenner 2000: 149).
In addition to the above arguments, which for the most part also apply to the reading of literary texts in the native language and to reading outside a school context, the foreign language literary text provides material for language learning in a context of meaning. More than in other types of text, the understanding of parts and the understanding of the whole in a literary text exist in a dialectic interdependence. If the content is interesting to young readers, they are willing to strive hard to understand the meaning of parts, right down to the individual word if necessary. They will also discover that the interpretation of words depends on the text as a whole. Thus the reading process depends on a constant interplay and feedback between the parts and the whole, what Dilthey calls the ‘hermeneutic circle’ (Newton 1997: 45). The final argument I want to put forward is that literature does not only represent contemporary foreign culture. Written texts can also represent the past which has survived and been handed down “to make memory last. Literature [] has acquired its own simultaneity with every present” (Gadamer 1997: 48). Different from historic texts, the literary text thus offers young readers a unique chance to communicate with the foreign culture of the past and enables them to gain insight into this aspect of culture as it is perceived by members of the foreign community.
Literary theory and hermeneutics
In the previous section, a series of arguments for using the literary text as learning material in the foreign language classroom have been presented. Some of these arguments are based on my view of literature and the relationship between text and reader. Before sketching an approach to working with the literary text in the classroom, some aspects of this relationship will be looked at from a point of view of literary theory as well as from a philosophical point of view.
Recent literary theory has changed its focus from the relationship between the text and its author to the relationship between the text and its reader. The historical-biographical method of looking for clues to the meaning of a text in the author's life, has been replaced by receptionist theory where it is the reader and his or her understanding of the text which have become the main focus. The former theory occupied a large space in the teaching of literature in schools. It was then replaced by New Criticism, which also influenced teaching, including foreign language teaching, to a large extent. With this theory came close reading of texts, an important contribution to the foreign language classroom. Close reading was based on the thought that meaning had to be found within the novel, the drama or the poem itself, which in its turn was seen as an organic, structured entity. From this point of view the fictional work exists separate from its writer, its reader and its context. Both the historical-biographical method and New Criticism tend to ignore the reader's role as a co-producer of meaning. Another common denominator for these theories is a possibly naive view of language generally, and literary language in particular, that it refers to reality in a one-to-one correlation. Such a view of literature and language makes the reading process receptive and not productive. A process where students can relate actively to the text is far more interesting in relation to foreign language learning.
In Från text till handling2 Ricoeur describes two attitudes to a literary text: one of explaining and one of interpreting, where explanation is associated primarily with science, and interpretation and understanding with the humanities (Ricoeur 1992: 39ff). These two attitudes will result in two different approaches to the text in the classroom. In the former the text is regarded as an autonomous entity as can be recognised in the views of New Criticism as well as of structuralism. This view requires the reader to explain or, often in the classroom situation, have the text explained by the teacher, and this has been the prevalent classroom attitude to literary texts, especially where foreign language texts are concerned.
The latter attitude requires a different approach because interpreting means that “to read is to compare a new discourse with the discourse of the text”. Ricoeur talks about ‘appropriation’ of a text, and inherent in this is that the interpretation of a text is realised through “the subject’s interpretation of himself” (54). The subject or the reader, through the reading process, starts to understand himself in a different way: “… in the hermeneutical reflection – or in the reflexive hermeneutic – the building of the self and the meaning (sens) are simultaneous” (55). The reader makes the text his own or in other words, the semantic possibilities inherent in the text are realised, made real, by the reader in a temporal situation. Interpreting is seen as communication with the text, and the relationship between reader and text is comparable to the relationship between the spoken text and the linguistic system. The reader becomes a co-producer of meaning in communication with the written text. When a break in that communication occurs, which it invariably will as misunderstanding is an inherent part of any communication process, particularly in a foreign language, readers have to try to understand why it collapsed and negotiate with the text. Thus, as readers, we find ourselves in a dialogic process.
In many ways a hermeneutical view of the process of reading literature is similar to any learning process. Statements are seen as answers to questions we have – open questions we carry around with us all the time. The statements we encounter can answer our questions or, in other words, fill the gaps. This view is also the basis for autonomous learning (Fenner 1997, 2000). The learners have to become aware of the questions and gaps they have in their knowledge before they can find the answers to them. The answers might be there, as in a lot of traditional teaching which is based on presenting answers, but as long as the learners are not aware of their own questions, they will not be capable of utilising the answers or statements. Each individual learner has his own questions dependent on his or her pre-understanding or ‘Vorverständnis’ in Gadamer’s words, his or her ‘horizon’. Whether the answers given in the classroom fall into line with the questions each individual has, depends on his or her pre-knowledge. If and when it does, it constitutes a communicative experience and learning can take place. Hermeneutics talks about this as the “harmonious state between a hermeneutically accessible phenomenon (the statement) and the pre-knowledge. The statements fall into place within the ‘horizon’ constituted by the question”. Identifying one’s own lack of knowledge and experiencing a wish to fill the gap are two aspects of the same thing (Hellesnes 1988). A literary text consists of statements and presents answers to our own questions; reading literature and discovering the answers can be defined as a communicative experience. A relationship between subject (reader) and ‘the other’ (text) is established.
One of the aims of hermeneutics is to fight cultural distance, to make what was ‘foreign’ one’s own. (Ricoeur 1992: 55) This is also the aim in the foreign language classroom. Only by entering into communication with the other, is it possible to understand the other as well as oneself. In foreign language learning the reading of literature must be seen as a double process. Entering into a communication process with the literary text is also entering into a dialogic process with the foreign culture, where not only the text and the culture in question are interpreted, but where the individual learner’s self is developed through temporal dialogue and interpretation. Personal engagement on the learner’s side is vital in this process. Foucault claims that knowledge of the foreign culture cannot be acquired passively: “The idea that the other can simply reveal or disclose itself to us, without any work whatsoever on our part, is ultimately unintelligible. There can be no access to the other without our actively organising the other in terms of our categories” (Falzon1998: 37). Our own categories are, however, also dynamic and will be altered by outside influence in the dialogic process. Learners will impose their categories upon the foreign culture in order to understand, simultaneously with being influenced by the foreign culture and having their own understanding changed. Through this dialectic process with the foreign language text, both cultural awareness and language awareness develop
Dialogue and learning
At this point it is necessary to have a closer look at the term dialogue and its importance for learning. In linguistics communication and dialogue are regarded in terms of encoding and decoding language. Both processes depend on the speaker’s as well as the listener’s pre-knowledge, expectations, prejudices, and the social context. Dialogue, in its true meaning, is an exchange between a minimum of two partners. As stated previously, Ricoeur includes a third party, namely the topic which the participants communicate about. Dialogue, however, can take place without communication. Most communication models dealing with encoding and decoding as separate aspects of a process can be used to show this. The same is the case with numerous examples of modernist and postmodernist literature as well as the Theatre of the Absurd, suffice it to mention the plays of Ionesco and Samuel Beckett (cf. Katnić-Bakaršić’s article in this volume).
In the foreign language classroom we wish our learners to be able to communicate, not merely perform dialogues. A prerequisite of communication is that there is a minimum of understanding between speaker and listener. Encoding and decoding cannot be regarded as linear processes; they are aspects of an open-ended process where encoding and decoding occur simultaneously, and where both participants attribute similar meanings to the context in which the communication takes place. What Rommetveit calls “reciprocally adjusted perspective setting and perspective taking” is necessary in order for dialogue to be termed as communication: “Reciprocal adjustment of perspectives is achieved by an ‘attunement to the attunement of the other’ by which states of affairs are brought into joint focus of attention, made sense of, and talked about from a position temporarily adopted by both participants in the communication” (Rommetveit 1992: 23). This can hardly be achieved when learners work with constructed dialogues in textbooks, even when they are used only as a starting point. Because they are most often devoid of meaning, there is hardly any topic on which to focus attention and make sense of. I will, therefore, claim that they can only serve as examples of speech conventions, and as thus they have a very limited function in foreign language learning.3
Dialogue as such does not necessarily provide a potential for learning unless it is dialectic, i.e. intended to solve differences between two views without dichotomising these. But in order to solve differences, the participants have to become aware of these differences, whether they are between individuals, between cultures or between reader and text. In what ways can the reading of literature in the foreign language classroom serve the purpose of providing learners with a focus for dialogue and communication? In foreign language learning speaking and writing have been regarded as productive skills while reading and listening have been classified as receptive skills. This is based on a view of foreign language learning as a kind of hierarchical system where the so-called productive skills have traditionally been regarded as more important when the student is assessed. When literature is used in the classroom, the reader is commonly seen as the recipient of a text produced by somebody else, the writer, and consequently the reader takes on a passive role. In this opinion it is only once the reader does something with the text, like talking or writing about it, that he or she becomes a producer of language.
In my view this is not necessarily the case. A reader, and in particular a reader foreign to the language of the text in question, can only come to grips with a text as co-producer of language and meaning. Nystrand calls this process configuration: “Written communication is never a case of the unilateral transmission of meaning, one way from writer to reader; writers do not do the “encoding” and readers do the “decoding”; … Text meaning is uniquely configured by what both writer and reader bring to the text and consequently how they interact” (Nystrand 1992: 160-61). Bakhtin describes the reading process in a similar way: “[message] X is not transmitted from the writer to the reader, but is constructed between them as a kind of ideological bridge, is built in the process of their interaction” (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1985: 152). Reading a literary text, according to Bakhtin, creates “suspense between utterances”, the utterances of the writer of the text and the potential utterances of the reader, the inherent questions with which the reader encounters the text (Wertsch 1992). Characteristics of the text: language, content, and cultural aspects, require interpretation, an active encounter with potential meanings of the literary text. Lexical, functional, and cultural aspects have to be interpreted as they are not static entities with one given meaning, but are given meaning by the subject, the reader, in the reading process. The reader will engage his or her experience and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1994) in the process of understanding, and diversity of background and cultural capital will thus be determining factors for what the individual gets out of the textual dialogue. In a classroom this means that there are a number of different dialogues taking place even when learners concentrate on the same text. Each reader of a specific piece of literature will be a participant in a dialogue, and this dialogue will differ from one reader to another.
The literary text does not speak in one tongue to all readers; different ‘voices’ in the text will speak to different readers in different ways. The more gaps there are in the text itself, the more the interpretation will vary. Because the reader is an active creator of meaning, reading literary texts is not a receptive process, but a productive one. The foreign language learner thus produces meaning already in the reading process itself; he or she is actively participating in a dialogue with the text even before being asked to produce oral or written language about the text in the classroom. When reading a literary text in a foreign language, the reader also encounters a foreign culture, expressed through the language, and Bakhtin’s “kind of ideological bridge” is constructed, not only between reader and text, but also between two cultures.
The above process will take place whenever a literary text is read. The classroom situation, with its general aim of learning, has other requirements than just interpreting, understanding, and emotionally responding to a literary text. In our case the requirements are learning a foreign language as well as acquiring cultural knowledge and competence. As teachers in the classroom can have no insight into the learning process which goes on within the readers, it is necessary to engage learners in a further process of talking or writing in order to gain that insight. Examples of this will be explored at a later point in this article when reader responses to Oscar Wilde’s text, The Selfish Giant, are interpreted and discussed. Further work on the text is also necessary if the learner’s understanding and knowledge are to be enhanced.
In my view there are three main reasons for written and oral dialogue about the literary text in the classroom. The first is, as mentioned above, that it provides the best opportunity for the teacher to become aware of and gain insight into the learning process which goes on within the individual. It is only through authentic oral or written dialogue that the teacher can find out anything about the outcome of the reading and learning processes. Secondly, according to Vygotsky, learning takes place in social interaction. Thought is developed through language, and by expressing themselves through speech or writing the learners develop their thinking as well as their speaking (Vygotsky 1991). Although Vygotsky primarily speaks about the native language, there is little reason to believe that foreign languages are developed very differently. Learning a foreign language is being socialised into a new culture through interaction with that culture, and the literary text represents the personal voice of that culture. Thirdly, communication about a text will give learners a chance to become aware of limitations in their own understanding. By listening to and discussing what other learners and the teacher express about their individual interpretations and understanding of the text, the learners will discover new aspects of that text, as well as personal reactions to it, which will, through further dialogue, expand their own scope and enhance their learning. In order to encourage authentic dialogue about the literary text, the nature of the tasks given is of vital importance. Examples of tasks and learners' response to them will be discussed at a later point in this article.
In a foreign language classroom where the teacher is considered the sole possessor and source of knowledge, there is little or no dialogue. Communication in such a classroom consists of monologue or at best monologic dialogue: a pretence dialogue with the sole purpose of getting the learners to produce corrects answers. There is no exchange of opinions on 26 language, literature or culture. Unfortunately this is very often the situation in foreign language classrooms, even when the aim is communicative competence, and it is also the case when literature and other cultural topics are on the agenda. If a textbook presents a literary text, it is most commonly followed by tasks concerned with understanding the surface content of the text. Closed questions of the type: Who is the main person? What happens? etc., prevail in textbooks and classroom tasks relating to literature. The answers to such questions only have two possible outcomes: the learner who has read the text and looked up the difficult words get them right; the ones who have not read the text properly will invariably get them wrong or not be able to answer. The sole purpose of such questions is to enable the teacher to check who has done the homework and who has not. Those learners who have read and understood the words in the text can produce correct answers by reproducing parts of the text in question, but they do not produce language. Neither do they get a chance to contribute their personal interpretation and opinion of the literary text. There is no real dialogue because authentic dialogue, an exchange of information and views on a subject where both participants have to adjust their attitudes and views, depends on new information being exchanged.
In order to provide for classroom discourse of a different, more genuine kind, authentic questions need to be asked. By authentic questions I mean questions which will engender answers that are not pre-empted. If the teacher, for instance, asks who the author of a specific literary text is, the answer is known to him or her as well as to the majority of the learners. If the teacher, on the other hand, poses questions about the learners’ own interpretations and opinions of the text, the resulting answers will present novel information to every participant in the classroom discourse, including the teacher. Each learner will thus be given the opportunity to contribute to the ensuing ‘classroom text’ (Fish 1980). Different views will be exposed and can give learners a new and increased understanding of the text, and the teacher might also see it in a different light. A basis for interesting classroom discussion is given in which everybody takes on a participating role, and where everybody, including the teacher, is learning something new. Answering this type of question forces the individual to produce language and meaning as well as contributing a part of him/herself. It is, however, essential that the teacher does not have a preconceived idea of the exact meaning of the text in question, but keeps an open mind towards new interpretations.
Choice of text
The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde was chosen primarily for the following reasons: language and text quality, genre, intertextuality and cultural recognition. Although fairly difficult for some learners in a mixed-ability class, it is possible for a group of 14 year-olds to cope with the linguistic level of the story. It can be hard to predict what a group of learners will find difficult in a text. Many foreign language teachers tend to regard any text as difficult for learners if it is of some length and if there are several unfamiliar words or grammatical structures. Unfortunately, interpretations of Krashen’s concept of ‘comprehensible input’ has contributed to such an understanding of what constitutes a difficult text. As adult readers we know that difficulty in interpreting a literary text does not necessarily consist of ‘difficult’ words or length. A very short poem with commonly used vocabulary can be extremely hard to interpret. Experience also shows that if young learners take an interest in the topic or the story, they can cope with surprisingly difficult texts as regards vocabulary, structure and length. If given the opportunity to discover that unfamiliar vocabulary in a literary text does not necessarily present an unsurpassable obstacle to grasping meaning, some learners experience this as a revelation.
In addition to functioning on a superficial level of action, The Selfish Giant has fairly obvious gaps inherent in the text. The story is not merely a simple, straight-forward narrative, but works on different levels and opens up for the individual’s personal interpretation. Despite requiring personal interpretation, the story is not too difficult for young readers, and they can manage to identify with aspects of the text. If the structure of a text is too complex, it requires an analytical approach on a meta-level where the reader places him or herself ‘outside’ the text, and this cannot be expected of 14 year-olds.
The intercultural encounter in literature is made simpler by the fact that the text represents something which is familiar to children of many cultures: a genre resembling the fairy-tale. Because of its similarity with some of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-stories, Oscar Wilde’s text might even be more familiar to Scandinavian readers than to English readers. The class in this particular project had previously spent quite a long time on different kinds of fairy-tales, including writing their own, and knew the genre well. But familiarity is not only to be found in the genre. General simple features of narrative are also recognisable to the foreign reader: the state of disharmony at the beginning of the story, the change of character in the middle, and the restoration of harmony at the end. So despite being written in a foreign language, literature can offer a more familiar basis to the reader when encountering the other culture than many real life situations.
The religious aspect of The Selfish Giant is also part of a commonly shared cultural heritage. Thus, behind the foreign language there is cultural recognition, and a text like this raises certain intertextual expectations even in a young reader. Oscar Wilde's story also challenges the young learner because, as a fairy-story, it has a surprising ending, which invites differences of opinion and, therefore, discussion. Because there are features of both structure and content which young readers have the possibility of recognising from their own culture, they can use these familiar features as assistance in a mediating process with the text (Lantolf 2000), where recognition provides them with a certain kind of ‘scaffolding’.
Vital to young readers’ motivation is that the text evokes some kind of emotional response and inherent in Wilde’s text is the possibility of such response. Recognition can in itself spark an emotional response, as can the pastoral beauty of the description, and the feelings evoked by the death of the main character might be another affective response. Fairy-stories often have a fairly simple moral and young learners recognise the moral messages of fairytales; they form part of their intertextual expectations. In The Selfish Giant there is room for interpretation as far as the moral is concerned, an aspect which gives learners a chance to see different moral messages, and because the narrative is a fantasy, they do not necessarily feel that the text is moralistic. They also know and relate to Christian morals although they often pretend not to.
The merging of two diverse literary traditions has the potential to make Wilde’s narrative interesting and surprising to this age group because it is unexpected and unfamiliar. Through the cultural artefact, ‘the Other’, they encounter two separate traditions with which they are familiar in their own culture. By presenting the familiar from the outside, Wilde’s story offers them a new perspective from which to approach moral questions. In such a textual context, these questions have the potential to engage young readers more than either the simplistic fairytale moral or the Christian moral would do separately.
There is an increasing demand in schools and exams that pupils should be presented with authentic situations, where authentic means ‘real life’. This is presumably to prepare students for life after school, the outside reality. Oscar Wilde’s story in no way offers a representation of this kind of reality; it is a fantasy story with few realistic links. The choice of text was, however, not made in order to give the learners a chance of escapism. Fantasy can offer young people a chance to use their experience to imagine what reality could be and, therefore, something that can challenge them to extend their knowledge and experience (Sørensen 1983). By giving them valuable images of reality, fantasy provides them with tools for reflection and thought. According to Ricoeur such tools are necessary for our personal development as members of contemporary society. Unless we want to become victims of a technocratic society, we need as members of that society to include fantasy in our rationality (Nicolaysen 1997).
Classroom procedures
How can we create a learning situation in the classroom where an authentic dialogue with and about a literary text is possible? This part of the article is an attempt to describe and discuss the procedures chosen for this particular project in order to facilitate and mediate a dialogic process using a literary text. The following kinds of dialogue were planned: dialogue between learner and text, oral dialogue between peers, written dialogue between individual learners and the teacher, and, finally, oral dialogue between the whole group of learners and teacher. The classroom procedures consisted of these elements:
- encountering ‘the Other’ in the form of a short story by listening and reading;
- learners’ spontaneous oral response to the text in groups;
- learners’ individual written responses to a set of tasks;
- classroom discourse about interpretations based on individual answers to the tasks;
- planning further work based on classroom discourse.
In this particular case I chose to let the learners listen to a professional reading of Oscar Wilde’s text for two main reasons: Norwegians associate fairytales and folktales with an oral tradition and they are used to listening to stories being told or read to them from a very early age. A good reading is also easier for dyslectic learners and most weak learners to understand, and it assists their own reading process. It is a question of mutual support: listening supports reading, and the written word on the page supports listening. In addition to the above, a professional reading enhances the pure enjoyment of the story.
After listening while looking at the text, learners spent time close-reading the story at school with the optional assistance of peers, teacher and dictionaries. Experience has taught me that concentrated classroom time on reading is time well spent, as the learners get an opportunity to concentrate on one thing over a lengthy period. This is contrary to current foreign language methodology, which 30 accentuates rapid changes of activity to counteract boredom. In my view this disturbs the students’ possibility to concentrate. During the reading period, weaker learners were given the opportunity to repeated listening of the recorded text.
As learning generally, and language learning in particular, is dependent on social interaction (Vygotsky 1991), the students were asked to present their immediate response in groups, without focusing on any specific aspect of the text. They discussed problems they had with understanding, difficult words and structures as well as their personal and emotional response. According to Vygotsky's theory of proximal zones, young people will extend their knowledge and understanding with assistance (Vygotsky 1991), and as Lantolf claims in his article “Second language learning as a mediated process”, they can receive valuable assistance through peer mediation (Lantolf 2000). Talking about the text also forces them to reflect, and their thinking as well as their speaking develops through communication (Vygotsky 1991). Bakhtin even states that meaning is created through dialogue and response is the activating principle (Bakhtin 1991). By listening to other learners’ views, they also enhance their own understanding of the text. Group discussions can in addition offer the teacher valuable insight into their way of thinking.
The next step of the process was working individually with written tasks designed to promote dialogue, tasks which will be discussed in the next section of this article. While writing the learners have time for proper reflection on what they have listened to, read and discussed with peers. By having to structure their thoughts through written communication, they further develop both thought and language. Writing makes them aware of their lack of vocabulary, and they have to learn new words according to their own needs to express themselves. The answers to the tasks were then read by the teacher and became the basis for the ensuing classroom discourse.
Although this stage of the process may appear very traditional, the classroom dialogue was not identical to the traditional question and answer monologues which learners are exposed to when teachers or textbooks ask comprehension questions to a literary text. It was based on the learners’ written response to non-finite tasks which enhance dialogue with the text. At this stage the teacher knew what the learners had answered, and the classroom discourse concentrated on areas which the learners had focused on and, therefore, also their needs: differences of opinion, interesting personal interpretations, problematic aspects of the narrative, specific features of language as well as content and form. Because there are no correct or incorrect answers, each member of the class, including the teacher, has something to contribute to this kind of classroom dialogue. The learners’ response has shown where the text causes problems for the readers and where there are gaps in the text which need to be expanded upon. How learners interpret the text is made audible in the classroom and the discussion widens the learners’ personal horizon. According to Fish, the text that develops in the classroom when a literary text is discussed can be regarded as a different text from the original, and a new ‘classroom text’ emerges (Fish 1980). This is a text shared by learners and teacher, and its quality depends on all the contributors, even if the teacher is a more experienced reader and user of the foreign language and also monitors the mediating process.
Tasks
Previously in this article it was claimed that dialogue with a text depends on the hypotheses with which any reader approaches a text as a cultural manifestation. Inherent in the text is the possibility of the readers becoming aware of the questions they want answered, although they are not necessarily conscious, or even the possibility of finding answers to these questions. In order to promote communication with a text, it is important that the learner is willing to engage him/herself in the dialogue. Most learners will go through the immediate reading process with a certain amount of interest to find out what the text is about. They read for the action and the plot: to find out what happens. During this process they will usually look up certain words which they find necessary for an overall understanding of what happens. This is usually where their reading experiences outside school stop and beyond which most of them need assistance and mediation (Lantolf 2000) to engage in further work as the demands on them increase. At this point it is important to consider tasks which promote dialogue rather than to tell them what the various metaphors and symbols in the text mean. Simple questions can help a dialogic procedure resulting in interaction and learning.
It has been said that differentiation is not so much a matter of the text used in the classroom as of the tasks. As discussed previously, the literary text has too often been accompanied by comprehension questions about the characters and actions in a literary text, in more recent coursebooks perhaps concluded with one question asking for the reader’s opinion of the story. ‘Closed’ comprehension questions do not encourage dialogue, whether it is with the text or with peers in the classroom. To stimulate language production the questions need to be open-ended, with scope for the learner to use his or her own experience or imagination when trying to discover meaning in the text.
As Birthe Sørensen points out in her article about literary texts in the classroom (1983), reading a literary text is to some extent a realisation of self or at least a potential realisation. The question is how the teacher and tasks can mediate a process of dialogue with the text which enhances a process of reflection and thought through the foreign language, a process which is more than just reading for entertainment.
One of the first criteria is that the teacher does not impose his or her interpretation of the text upon the learners. It is important that they are given a chance to express their own reactions to the text, and these reactions must be made audible or visible in the classroom. By provoking response and making the learners express this response in written or oral language, they have an opportunity to develop thought as well as language (Vygotsky 1991). The process is mediated both by tasks, by peers and by the teacher. The type of questions asked in this process, are of vital importance. When given tasks, learners have become accustomed to asking themselves what answers the teacher might want. Even open questions are often interpreted as ‘closed’ by the learners and, based on school experience, they tend to think that there is one given correct answer. Consequently the tasks have to be of a character which makes it difficult for the learners to present answers which they believe will please the teacher.
This group of learners were given tasks with the purpose of making them relate to the text personally, to interpret meaning, to reflect on it, and to form an opinion. The focus of all three questions is on the text and the reader’s response to it, and they are formed in such a way as to make the learners focus on the text itself and not on the teacher’s reading, which would constitute the teacher’s text as a product. Rather than making the teacher the centre of attention, the questions force the learners to concentrate on the text itself and their individual reading of it (Sørensen 1983). The young group of learners were asked the following questions:
1. What genre do you think this text is?
2. What surprised you in the text?
3. What did you like about this story?
If the text could easily have been recognised as one particular genre, the first question would not have been asked, because it would invite a simple correct or incorrect answer. As the narrative can be characterised in different ways, this question was given to promote reflection on familiar literary structures in order to encourage discussion and reasoning for the different views. From their answers the learners might see that there are various recognisable literary features in this story. At the same time the question might evoke feelings of familiarity with the story despite it being an artefact of the foreign culture. The question was also intended to familiarise the learners with a limited use of literary terminology in the foreign language, a terminology which they at this stage have already acquired in their native language. In this way, their mother tongue functions as support when exploring a text as an expression of the foreign culture. Lantolf discusses mediation through native language in relation to Vygotsky’s proximal zones, and states that learners will find support in their own language (Lantolf 2000). Although the learners in this particular case used English in their written answers as well as in the ensuing discussion, the principle is the same: the learners discover that when the concepts are familiar to them in their mother tongue, they find support in the knowledge they have already acquired. Consequently it is no more complicated to talk about a literary text than about any other topic with which they are familiar and take an interest in.
The second question was an attempt to make the reader enter into a direct dialogue with the narrative. It was intended so that the learners could focus on gaps in the text and perhaps its central idea. It might also cause the learners to focus upon areas which were not clear to them or unclear in the text itself. The question might also reveal superficial readings and a lack of understanding (Sørensen 1983). An ensuing classroom discussion can ‘fill’ the gaps with individual interpretations, which again can be discussed. The learners’ interpretations can also give the teacher new views on the text, and, consequently, he or she participates in the learning process rather than being the sole provider of knowledge.
The third task opens up for the individual’s emotional response to the text. Again, there are no right or wrong answers to the question; each answer is equally valid and interesting to all the learners, and can give them enhanced knowledge and understanding of the narrative. The answers can also give both learners and the teacher information and knowledge about the other learners’ thought processes and how they are expressed in language, and thus the information provided serves a social purpose, too: learners get to know each other better.
The personal opinions expressed by the learners created the basis for the classroom text: the shared, common text arrived at through classroom discussion (Fish 1980). The answers might pose new questions which can be used in further interpretations of the literary text. In this way the learners take part in structuring the process of further work, and the literary analysis will be based on their focus rather than the teacher’s. Such a process is far more motivating than a literary analysis which is based on the teacher’s interpretation.
Another aspect of posing and answering the above questions is that the learners have to produce language rather than reproduce language from the text. They have to reflect on their own personal response to the text and express their reactions and opinions. In doing this, they hypothesise about the text, they find answer to their conscious or unconscious questions, and they pose further questions. Hypothesising and formulating questions are central to dialogue and communication. Reading the text raises questions on one level, discussing it with others in the classroom makes this process explicit. In this way the text is used as a tool for reflection and thought simultaneously with developing written and oral skills in the foreign language. And because the learners also express personal likes and dislikes, the dialogue enhances the affective aspect of their foreign language use.
Learners’ response
In this final part of the article some of the learners’ response to the tasks given will be presented. The classroom discourse on the text which followed will not be discussed further, as, for the purpose of analysing dialogic interaction with the text, the written response functions better as an illustration than the ensuing classroom work. The most interesting responses are to be found among the answers to the second and third questions. These reveal the readers’ expectations of the text and what aspects of the story they identify with, as well as their likes and dislikes. Two answers to the first question, however, show the variation in opinion about the genre, and can serve as an illustration of a potentially fruitful classroom discussion about the genre of The Selfish Giant.4
“It is a fairytale because it is not true and giants are only in fairytales.”
“I think that this text is a short story because there is a turning point in the middle of the text. I think the turning point is when the Giant lets the children play in his garden.”
Both answers prove intertextuality between learner and text; the readers’ expectations created by previous knowledge of other texts encounter this particular text. The latter example shows that the learner has a solid grasp of specific features required of a narrative plot. Each is in itself just a statement about the purpose of the story, but posed against each other and made ‘audible’ in the classroom, the dichotomy forms an interesting basis for a discussion where the readers are forced to defend their views and, perhaps, discover that they are not mutually exclusive. Thus it is not the teacher, but the learners who create the focus of discussion.
Answers to the second question show great variety within the classroom, as one would expect when learners are given scope to express personal attitudes. Most of the learners, however, write about the religious aspect of Oscar Wilde’s story. This is probably partly due to the expectations they have because the narrative starts as a fairytale, but also to the fact that young Norwegian readers, as members of a secular society, are not often confronted with literary texts which are religious, especially not in foreign language teaching. Textbooks generally tend to shy away from texts which display moral values. One learner expresses her surprise in the following manner:
“There is a lot of surprises in the last part of the short story. It surprises me that the little boy is a symbol of Jesus Christ, and that the Giant cared so much for the little boy. I was really shocked when I read this sentence: ‘For on the palms of the child’s hand were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.’ It also surprises me that the selfish Giant became a kind friend to the children.”
It is obvious that the narrative has had a strong emotional effect on this reader as she uses the word ‘shocked’. The nature of her surprise is at first one of intertextual expectation which is not met: characters in fairytales are not usually equipped with empathy and care for others. She is also surprised at the way Wilde introduces a religious aspect into what she believes to be a fairytale, although she classifies the narrative as a short story. Her shock is related to both content and language, the effect which this particular sentence has on her. It is the language of the authentic text, Oscar Wilde’s written words about the child, which evokes her emotions, and she shows this by quoting the sentence rather than giving an account of its content. In the dialogue with a fantasy, she engages all her emotional reality when faced with a suffering child. To her, it is no longer a ‘foreign’ language; it is a language and a content which she identifies with and reacts to emotionally.
Several of the readers are surprised by the ending of the story: “It surprised me most that the giant died”. Again it is a surprise created by an intertextual expectancy of the text by the reader. What they see as a fairytale should have a happy ending according to their previous reading experience. If they had been asked traditional comprehension questions after having read the text, it would not have been possible to discover what they had expected. By asking what surprised them in the narrative, however, the teacher has the opportunity of seeing how advanced their understanding of genre is, and also of discovering which parts of the narrative evoke reactions.
The Norwegian Curriculum of 1997 is heavily based on text and a variety of genres, and text competence is seen as an essential aspect of communicative competence. Text is defined widely as oral and written texts, including the learners’ own texts, pictures, music, drama etc. A number of factual and literary genres are listed as texts to be read, listened to, watched and spoken. They are also intended as models for the students’ own speaking and writing. Genre characteristics are not seen as a set of rules, but as a tool for the writer when creating texts for various purposes. The learners need to be able to recognise genres as well as experience how writers break the ‘rules’ in order to convey different messages. This increases the learners’ options when creating their own texts. The aspects of Wilde’s text which surprise them thus focus on how the author uses his creative freedom, and it also enhances their text competence.
Their response to the unforeseen ending of the story becomes clear when they answer the third question about how they like the story. One learner expresses it in this way:
“I didn’t like that the Selfish Giant who had become the kind-hearted Giant died at the end. Poor children, who came into the garden to play, and found the Giant lying dead at the ground. For the Giant it was a good thing that he died, because he could visit the little boy who he loved, in his garden, which is paradise.”
In this case, too, there is a strong identification with the characters. First the reader identifies with the children by feeling sorry for them because they are faced with death. Again, there is an emotional reaction to what the characters experience in the narrative, which shows that the reader is personally involved in the fictional universe. Literary texts deal with the human predicament, what is common between cultures rather than the differences. Despite the foreign language, the learners have no problems with identification and recognition of what is common to different cultures, in this case grief. The two cultures communicate in a dialogue. Learners of this age group like a happy ending, and they expect it in the fiction they normally read. As stated earlier in this article, they like to see harmony restored. Consequently the majority of this group was disturbed by the fact that the main character dies. This particular learner shows clearly that he enters into a dialogue with the text in order to restore harmony despite the fact that, in his view, this is a sad ending. His interpretation is then to look for a happy ending, and he discovers it in the religious aspect of eternal life.
Another reader sees this in a different way: “I like the ending because it is so different from everything else I have read”. In this case it is the ‘foreign’ element which appeals. This is interesting in relation to foreign language learning as teachers and textbook writers often presume that what is ‘foreign’ makes things difficult. Here there is an example of the opposite. I think it is often the case with young learners that what they find strange or exotic creates interest. The pedagogical principle of learners having to be faced with something familiar in order to develop motivation for learning, is not always true. As can be seen from the above examples, some learners respond to content and some to linguistic aspects of the text. The following example shows that there are learners, even at this stage, who also respond to the more theoretical textual aspects of the narrative:
“I liked that there was a story behind the story, because it is much better if the reader have to think about the moral and the story behind the story after he has finiched reading. I also liked that the Selfish Giant changes his opinion, and became friendly to the children. He lets them into his garden, and the frost, snow, North wind and hail disappears. The garden is reunited with the Spring! Another thing which I liked, was that the author changes the language in a paragraph at the end of the text. I liked it, because in that way, the author has some variation in the language. The key to a good story/text is varied language.”
This reader has an understanding of text and subtext and likes the fact that the story engages the reader’s reflections on the meaning of the narrative. He has read the story as a text, which, similar to the fairytale, has a moral. Young readers are preoccupied with morals, but unfortunately many teachers are worried about raising moral questions. As a result of being put into a dialogic situation, the moral aspect is raised by the learner and not the teacher. The last part of this answer is a proof of school knowledge and experience: the learner has been taught that variation in language is in itself good, perhaps a disputable statement. In this case the procedure gives the teacher an opportunity to investigate this statement and discuss it with the class. In any case, the student shows a certain degree of language awareness as a result of his reading and solving the task. An interesting aspect of this student’s response is the language he uses to express his opinions, which is clearly influenced by the narrative itself. An expression such as “The garden is reunited with Spring!” is above the language level expected of a learner of English as a foreign language at this stage, and it proves how a good quality text functions as a valuable model for language learning. The statement also shows fairly advanced ability to interpret text.
Other learners are also intrigued by the moral of Wilde’s story:
“I don’t know exactly what the boy ment by saying that ‘these are the wounds of love’, but it could be that God loves everybody irrespective of what people say or do. He even loves murderers in jails, and bad motherin- laws.”
This reader obviously tries out her ability to interpret a certain aspect of meaning in the text. There is here a certain embarrassment at expressing the Christian ethos in writing, an embarrassment which she tries to overcome by using irony and stereotypes in the last sentence. The learner has, however, managed to point out a problematic part of the narrative which can be focused upon in further work with the text. She has also seen that this particular part of the text is important and carries a message.
Some of the learners have problems expressing definite opinions about Wilde’s text: “I don’t have any special meaning about the story, but I think it was nice. And I learnd that you got to open your heart for everyone.” The learner means ‘opinion’ rather than ‘meaning’ which is a transfer of mother tongue. Although she has no clear opinion, she expresses her enjoyment of reading the text, and she also feels that the story has something to tell her. Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant is perhaps a moralistic text, but this age group clearly shows in their reactions that they do not respond negatively to the moral aspect. They have clear opinions of right and wrong and have no problems expressing their opinions honestly when dealing with a literary text. Sometimes this is written in almost simplistic terms: “I liked this passage, because the Giant decides that he will no longer be a selfish Giant, but he will be a kind giant.”
As one of the examples above shows, it is not always easy for this age group to express an opinion about a text, partly because foreign language learners are not very often asked to do so. Usually texts are treated as instructive for a specific purpose of learning: grammatical structures, a specific type of vocabulary, specific expressions useful in certain practical situations etc. Such aspects have been emphasised, also in communicative language learning, and curricula, teachers and textbook writers have decided which areas are important in order to communicate in the foreign language. But as expressed previously in this article, it is difficult to know exactly what students need to learn in order to communicate. The above examples of learners’ responses show that the areas upon which they focus when given a certain scope may be far from the ones we, as teachers, expect.
Conclusion
As outlined in this article, I have attempted to show that literature has an important part to play in foreign language learning today as far as cultural awareness and language awareness are concerned. In a dialectic communication process the literary text provides a personal voice, not only of contemporary foreign culture, but also of past culture. I have tried to show that interacting with literature provides the learners with a chance to communicate with the foreign culture through the foreign language with its multiplicity of meaning. Culture consists of a web of texts (Time 1989), and the literary text provides an authentic communication partner in a dialogue, where the reader will learn from ‘the Other’ while having to reflect on his or her own part in the communication process. During a sociocultural process of interpreting and understanding the text, answers can be found to potential and real questions that arise about the foreign culture through its expression in language. Tasks which promote interaction, both in the reading process and in the ensuing classroom discourse, enhance the learners’ awareness of their own culture which they bring to the text, as well as of the foreign culture as represented in the text. The literary text as an artefact of the foreign culture forces the reader to reflect on his own culture and identity, and gives the learner a chance to see himself from the outsider’s point of view. By focusing on learners’ interpretations and problems in the intercultural encounter with the foreign language text, peers and teacher can mediate a dynamic process of developing language awareness and cultural awareness.
References
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Notes
- This is my translation as the original meaning has been lost in the English edition: The Curriculum for the 10-year Compulsory School in Norway. The Royal Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs. Oslo: 1999.
- From Text to Action (my translation).
- For a further discussion on textbook dialogues, see Trebbi:" Mother tongue and foreign language learning – some aspects of a mutual relationship" in Aase, L., Fenner, A., Little, D. and Trebbi, T. (2000) Writing as cultural competence: a study of the relationship between mother tongue and foreign language learning within the framework of learner autonomy. CLCS Occasional Paper No. 56. Trinity College, Dublin.
- The errors in the learners’ texts have not been corrected.