LITERARY STUDY AND THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

Abstract:

Increasingly, the barriers between various" disciplines" of language study are eroding. Language specialists in the schools can no longer afford to be merely experts in native English, English as a Second language (ESL), or foreign language teaching exclusively, since useful insights may be drawn from each discipline. These connections, in fact, seem necessary in a transnational world where the distinctions between native and foreign language begin to seem quaintly colonial. In any case, pedagogical issues and problems for language teaching, whether they be native, foreign, or ESL, are probably more alike than different for the practicing teacher. Attention to the specific perspectives each tradition brings to language teaching can only benefit the practitioner in the long run (see Garfinkel 1982), and the students will reap the added sophistication for learning and using the language. Teachers of English have frequently supplied pedagogical insight for the teaching of English to nonnative speakers. Indeed, it can be argued that one goal for the ESL student is to understand English in the same way as the native speaker, and to a large extent, to employ the same literacy practices. As for writing proficiency, one composes in the same way whether one has learned the language as a native, or one has learned it as a second language. Some teachers even aspire to see that nonnative speakers of a language do not learn to read or write in a fundamentally different way than native speakers—in essence acting upon the presupposition that a fluent language user employs strategies and approaches to a text that should be the same regardless of …

Año de publicación:

2002

Keywords:

Fuente:

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