Teaching Literature in Modern Foreign Languages

Fotini Diamantidaki

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350063006
• eBook ISBN: 9781350063020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

From plays to poetry, Le Petit Nicolas to the Association for Language Learning (ALL) Literature wiki, this book shows trainee teachers of MFL, teachers in schools, teacher educators, how literature can be an essential tool for developing students' cultural awareness as well as language skills. With contributions from Ruth Heilbronn, Jane Jones and other leading scholars, it covers a wide range of approaches including looking at how to support students to develop the skills they need to read and discuss texts, and how to use stories as a pedagogic tool, rather than just a way to develop reading skills. Examples of teaching French, German, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish are used throughout, but the book draws together resources and strategies for use in teaching all modern foreign languages. Supporting students to develop into creative, reflective teachers, this book offers support for readers to develop their own tasks for their pupils and questions throughout to keep them engaged and encouraging them to critically engage with the content. Seemingly daunting articles are made much more approachable for readers with windows on research which provide a summary of relevant research papers, with full reference details for follow up.

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Literature, Culture and Democratic Citizenship

Ruth Heilbronn

Introduction

This chapter is about the fundamental importance of teaching literature in school, and in discussing this I draw particularly on ideas elaborated by Martha Nussbaum and John Dewey to explore how the teaching of literature contributes to the development of ‘narrative imagination’, the capacity to understand another person’s perspective, and how discussing characters’ interactions and dilemmas helps students to engage with social and interpersonal ethical issues.

In education systems worldwide, there is a premium on a ‘knowledge-based curriculum’, that is one in which students study subjects believed to give them the knowledge and skills needed for employment in twenty-first-century conditions. This is primarily an economic aim for education, with the curriculum generally focused on subjects thought useful to give ‘transferable skills and knowledge’. Subjects in the curriculum which are given importance in terms of curriculum time are those related to employability and to the idea of a global economy and global economic competition. These are mainly the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) with English often coming to be defined as literacy and with some limited time for humanities, the creative arts and languages, and this particularly impacts on the place of literature in the modern foreign language (MFL) classroom. The mechanism of competition, between schools and ultimately between countries, is used to provide the evidence required that the nation’s education system is effective or not. ‘Effectiveness’ is a key aim in this paradigm of what education should be, and effectiveness is defined in terms of quantitative data, such as examination results, which becomes the ‘evidence base’ for ‘effectiveness’ and is then used to drive education policy and curricular choices.

Necessarily in an educational culture in which assessment drives the curriculum, what is studied in school will be heavily managed to provide the evidence for the auditing of results. Performance management of teachers is one of the ways in which teachers are routinely monitored to ensure that they ‘deliver’ results (Isaac Mwita, 2000; Gleeson & Husbands, 2004). The culture which drives this activity has been described and analysed as a performativity culture (Davies, 2003; Ball, 2012; Murray, 2012). In education, professionals are tasked to rely on procedures to regulate their practices and since grades in examinations are the desired outcome in this scenario, an understandable tendency to ‘teach to the test’ often leads to a narrowing of the kinds of approaches to teaching so that what are perceived as ‘safe’ methods are the norm. This can lead to prescribing a specific kind of pedagogy, such as how to teach language in single words, chunks or language functions, and also in curriculum planning to accommodate demands of a specific pedagogy, as was common in MFL teaching in 1970s and 1980s. Then a communicative methodology with total use of target language was dominant, opposing an earlier mode of grammar-translation as the fundamental MFL teaching methodology. In non-MFL subjects, this trend towards prescribing a specific curriculum can be seen in history, for example, in a view that key events or dates signifying a ‘nation’s history’ should be the basis of study. In literature teaching in MFL as well as in English, this can be seen when canonical texts are recommended.

In a system judged by performance measurements, assessment ends tend to drive curricula and pedagogy. Some critics, such as Diane Ravitch, warn against excessive testing and audit in education:

It behoves us to take seriously concerns that the current emphasis on testing and inspection distorts the purposes of education. We no longer speak of education as a process of human development. (Ravitch, 2013: 265)

If we focus on language as the medium through which human development, in the form of culture, is enacted, we might argue that this distortion occurs when we separate teaching and learning into four discrete skill areas and test these separately. Discourse cannot be disaggregated in this way.

Reflection 1

Technicist and technical rationality

Writers use different terms for the kind of educational practice that is based on narrow goals of education, such as is exemplified in an economic model or one in which there is thought to be a ‘science of teaching’ that can be laid out using evidence about ‘what works’. This kind of view of practice is based on a view termed ‘technical rational’, following Dewey and also the philosopher Habermas who described ‘instrumental rationality’ in management. Technicist approaches assume that what needs to be managed; the purposes to be achieved, and the management process, are clear, fixed and unproblematic, whereas ‘real life’ is not actually that clear-cut.

What do you understand by a technically rational approach to learning?

• Can you give examples of practices that fit this definition, in your experience?

• Where might such an approach be effective and useful?

• Where might it not be adequate?

What is education for?

The model of education which is based primarily on effectiveness in examinations and league tables is only one way of underpinning educational policies and practices. Rather than starting from the auditing of achievement in examinations as the fundamental aim of education, we could start with a different primary aim. We could ask which human qualities and capabilities we wish to nurture and what kind of society we hope for. We could then ask, as did the philosopher Michael Oakeshott in the 1970s, questions like the following: what is the character of the world which a human newcomer is to inhabit? What does it mean to become human? Which human qualities do we wish to nurture and develop and how could education foster them? (Oakeshott, 1972). If we start from this more flexible proposition, rather than the economic aim, schools, curriculum and the work of teachers would look different from the current model. Richard Pring calls this ‘learning to be human’, which involves

first the acquisitions of knowledge and understanding to help one manage life intelligently; practical capabilities, and a developed sense of community with which our own well-being is connected … Most importantly added to this is the moral dimension in which young persons are enabled to see life as a whole, to think seriously about the life worth living, to recognise excellence and to want to pursue it in the activities they are engaged in. (Pring, 2012: 32)

Engagement with this moral dimension is also an aim of education, that is, to foster a sense of ‘moral seriousness’.

Reflection 2

Humanistic aims of education

1 Do you agree that basing education on the humanistic aims discussed by Oakeshott and Pring requires that teachers develop the dispositions to be open and welcoming to the possibility of ambiguity and complexity?

2 What is the role of teacher judgement? Is being able to exercise judgement important to your view of your role of a teacher?

3 What do you understand by the term ‘managerial teacher’ or ‘technician of education’, and how do questions 2 and 3 relate to question 1?

4 What kind of role might be played in this respect when students and teachers together tackle literary texts?

5 What kind of quality is ‘moral seriousness’ for you? Is it important for you as a teacher to support its development for your students?

Education as a social process

An argument is often put forward that literature should be taught in the foreign language classroom because it introduces children to the culture represented in that language. But there is also a more fundamental reason for why literature matters, and this is related to the quality of ‘moral seriousness’. Before going on to discuss literature teaching specifically, this section discusses the social basis of education and educational development. The quality of moral seriousness which we hope to foster in education matters because human development is a social process. From the time they are born, babies develop a sense of the meanings of things by interacting with others, who understand the baby’s gestures as communicative. The feedback given to the baby develops a meaning for gestures and at a later stage, language (Mead, 1934: 76, 81; Quarantelli & Cooper, 1966; McCall, 1977). As Elliot (1981) has shown, the young child who is learning language in interaction with others is also developing on all fronts, not just the linguistic one, and is trying to make sense of her social environment and the world of objects around her as well as what is coming at her as linguistic input.

So children are not isolated individuals and in this respect, John Dewey’s comment is as pertinent today as when he wrote it, over a hundred years ago. He reminds us that

only as we interpret school activities with reference to the larger circle of social activities to which they relate do we find any standard for judging their moral significance. (Dewey, 1909: 13)

He argued that the school is a place with a fundamental moral purpose relating to inducting children into the life of society and preparing them to take their place in the world. To accept the moral purpose of the school and the school as a place where children are together in what he called ‘a form of associated living’ presupposes interacting with people on the basis of mutuality and this means that whether it is explicitly stated or not, ‘the moral purpose of the school is universal and dominant in all instruction, whatever the topic’ (Dewey, 1909: 2). The school’s role is ‘the development of character through all the agencies, instrumentalities and materials of school life’ (3). Dewey believes that the child acquires a moral sense through learning in all subjects in which she is experimenting or actively engaged with ideas and ‘the school is an institution erected by society to contribute to maintaining the life and advancing the welfare of society’ (7). Crucially, ‘we must take the child as a member of society in the broadest sense, and demand for and from the schools whatever is necessary to enable the child intelligently to recognize all his social relations and take his part in sustaining them’ (8), while enabling the child’s individual development. The c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Literature, Culture and Democratic Citizenship
• 2 Literature in Primary Languages Classrooms
• 3 Literature and Drama for Transfer
• 4 The Storyline Approach and Literature
• 5 Literature in Non-European Languages
• 6 Teaching Poetry in Modern Foreign Languages
• 7 Literature and the Target Language
• 8 Teachers Supporting Teachers
• Index
• Copyright Page