The Use of Literary Texts in the Japanese High School EFL Class
212M024 S. K.
In this thesis, I have discussed potentialities of literary texts as reading materials in English reading class. I have put my thought to how teachers should enhance their students' awareness of text reading in English and how they should lead them to the pleasure of reading. Ii is my belief that literary texts are effective reading resources for language learning since they have many potential aspects to stimulate students to enjoy reading in many respects, such as the development of story line, stylistic features and thematic meaning, and such belief of mine has been strengthened by the finding in my experiment class which showed that many students got interested in reading an English poem.
In Chapter 1, I have introduced some realities of English reading class at high school. Looking back at some of my own failures in teaching EFL class I have ever had, I have got a belief that we need to pay more attention to the text itself that students read. Most of the reading materials in the current textbooks are informative or expository writings, which are not so exciting as to motivate high school students to read by themselves since they are basically remote from the reality of their lives. I, therefore, looked into the potentialities of literary texts, which may instigate their curiosity and interest. I examined the objectives in the Course of Study and the policy with which English textbooks are edited to study the characteristics of reading texts adopted in high school English textbooks. And also I compared them with those of Japanese language textbooks in order to see more clearly the validity of literary texts.
In Chapter 2, comparing four types of sample texts concretely, I have clarified the features of literary texts and discussed them in detail. They are usually distinctive in the three aspects: 1. Content with human interest, 2. Element of story, and 3. Style and special language use. A literary work usually focuses on a particular person, and develops a story concerning his life in a special writing style: it works its magic on the reader and takes him away into the world of text. Such attractive elements are largely absent from informative texts, or even if there are some, the reader rarely pays attention to them when reading the texts. These special qualities of literary texts surely make reading itself interesting and stimulating for students and give them a motive to read.
In Chapter 3, I have studied how we should make use of such rich reading materials as literary texts in class, casting a glance at recent reading strategies. Considering that they do not give information alone but they have many aspects which wait to be interpreted by the reader, I have concluded that teachers should lead their students to the level of interpretation through discussion in small groups or in the whole class. And by so doing the students can have an opportunity to experience the richness of literary texts both in terms of contents and language use, and also they may take a notice of the pleasure of reading itself. Seen from the viewpoint of interpreting texts, we should choose the way of close reading in using literary texts because they are richly suggestive on various levels unlike informative texts.
In Chapter 4, I have examined the so-called schema theory, and how it is related with reading. Schemas are a set of code formed in the reader with which he decodes the meaning, denotative or connotative, of a text. To be exact, the text does not convey its meaning by itself; the meaning of the text is explored or even created by the reader. If that is the case, the reader always activates his own schemas when reading any text, and activating schemas means that the reader interacts with the text, using his imagination and concentrating his whole self on understanding and interpreting the text. It is needless to say that when he has a large amount of schemas, he can read the text well. When reading informational texts, the reader uses only some of his schemas since those texts usually give only a mass of information, which is to be understood in a knowledge-based or concept-based way. Literary texts, on the other hand, force the reader to activate all of his schemas since they require interpretation on the part of the reader.
Schema is a kind of a cognitive network which influences people's way of perceiving, thinking and acting, and it is not fixed in its nature but always ready to be reconstructed. Its reconstruction can be done by any receptive experience including reading activities. Informational texts may certainly reconstruct it to an extent, but literary texts can change and restructure the reader's schemas more broadly than any other type of text because they involve his whole self in reading. They shake his schematic framework and may not only provide him with a new awareness of language but also even change his ideas of the world.
Chapter 5 is a sort of summary report of the experiment I did in one of my EFL classes to know how students respond to a literary text. I took up an American poem there and had my students read and interpret it as a reading activity. Treating a poem in an English reading class was really a kind of experiment because students had never learned a poem in English earlier. I did not employ usual teaching procedures but had them discuss the content of the poem in small groups first and then in the whole class. One of the most impressive things about the experiment is that the students enjoyed discussing the interpretation of the poem with classmates after reading it once individually. It seemed to me that the discussion deepened their understanding of the poem. It was interesting for me that nearly all students, including the students who found reading a poem less pleasant than informative texts, answered that to think the meaning of the poem by themselves was fun in the survey I made after class. Reading a poem certainly made them notice the pleasure of thinking about its theme, imagining the poet's situation and sympathizing with his emotions for themselves. Moreover, in the after-class questionnaire more than half of the students said that they want to have more chances to read a poem. I have found that most students are not averse to literary works; on the contrary, they have a positive attitude to reading them in the depth of their minds. It will be our task to think how we should harmonize their desire to read literary works and the improvement of their reading skills in English.