Approaches

• Approaches to teaching literature

  • Information-based Approach
  • Language-based Approach
  • Reader-Response Approach
  • Paraphrastic Approach
  • Moral-Philosophical Approach
  • Stylistic Approach
  • Task-Based Approach
• Information-based Approach


  • Activities: lectures, explanation, reading of notes and criticism provided in workbooks or by the teacher
  • Caters for instrumental purposes such as examinations
• Language-based Approach


  • Helps students focus on how language is used
  • Sees literary texts as resources for language practice rather than acquiring facts
  • Student-centered activities: prediction, cloze, ranking tasks, role play, poetry recital, forum, debate, and discussions
  • Emphasis on eliciting students' response to a text
• Reader-Response Approach


  • Motivates and encourages students to read by connecting themes to personal life and experiences
  • Responses are personal, concerned with students' feelings and opinions about the literary text
  • Activities: question-discussions, interpretative activities generating views and opinions, brainstorming, guided fantasy, small group discussions, journal writing
• Paraphrastic Approach


  • Deals with the surface meaning of the text
  • Teachers re-word the story in simpler language or translate it
  • Suitable for beginners as a stepping stone to formulating original assumptions
  • Activities: teacher retells the story/poem using simpler language, translation using other mother tongues, reading paraphrased versions or notes
• Moral-Philosophical Approach


  • Inculcates moral values through teaching of morality
  • Searches for moral value whilst reading a text
  • Assists students to understand themes in future readings
  • Activities: incorporation of moral values, reflective sessions, searching for values whilst reading, eliciting students' evaluation
• Stylistic Approach


  • Examines how linguistic forms in a literary text function to convey messages

  Objectives: 1) enables meaningful interpretations beyond surface meaning 2) expands students' language knowledge and awareness

  Activities: marking linguistic features, examining language features, extracting clues contributing to meaning
• Task-Based Approach


  Communicative task is a piece of classroom work involving learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing, or interacting in the target language, with attention principally on meaning rather than form

  Task should have a sense of completeness, being able to stand as a communicative act in its own right

  Task is an activity in which meaning is primary, there is some relationship to the real world, task completion has priority, and assessment is in terms of task outcome

  Task involves learners linguistically, physically, emotionally, intellectually, socially, critically, meaningfully, creatively, consciously/subconsciously, aesthetically, spontaneously, motivationally, experientially

  Leads to "Whole Literary Engagement" where literature is a means through which this whole engagement could be achieved