English Through Literature

Abstract

Nowadays, Korean students study English to get good grades on standardized tests, focusing on grammar, memorizing vocabulary, and improving reading strategies. For this reason, most of the students improve their receptive skills, such as listening and reading skills, rather than speaking and writing skills. Therefore, students are often demotivated and they have limited opportunity to develop their critical thinking skills. In order to address the above problems, this textbook focuses on teaching English through literature in order to raise the students’ motivation and to help them to develop their critical thinking skills. According to Lazar (1993), there are many reasons why literature should be used with L2 learners: the reading materials are motivating, students gain access to cultural background, literature enhances language acquisition, expands students’ language awareness, develops students’ interpretative abilities, and educates the whole person. Therefore, literature is helpful for language learners in an EFL context, since they are not only provided with language input but also cultural input as well. This textbook is designed to provide the students with many opportunities to improve their productive skills through selected graded readers. Speaking lessons will be based on group discussions or group projects and writing lessons will follow the Genre-Based Approach. By using this textbook, students will gain an opportunity to produce the target language while at the same time reading books in English (Day & Bamford, 2002). Moreover, students will be exposed to more authentic expressions through the reading materials.