© 1990 by Oxford University Press
Articles |
Literary competence: the EFL reader and the role of the teacher
Senior research fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature, Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, where she also teaches English literature to students in the degree course in Foreign Languages and Literatures.
This paper takes as its point of departure the problems which face EFL students of English literature when confronted directly with the reading of a literary text and which stem from a basic ‘literary inadequacy’. This, when combined with the difficulties posed by a very partial knowledge of the foreign language (with all its linguistic and cultural implications), can make the problem of ‘understanding’ a literary text seem an impossible task to the student. Many secondary and university-level EFL teachers feel the need to help students develop study strategies to improve literary competence. Study strategies aimed at developing the reader's awareness of how he1 should approach the reading of a literary text can be seen as a useful integration into the syllabus even by teachers in countries where tradition advocates a historical approach to the study of literature. Increasingly, it is the case that teachers in these countries, whether they be native or ‘imported’, would like to put more emphasis on the reading of the literary text to help students use more intelligently the historical-critical materials on which they tend to rely too heavily. The question of ‘literary competence’ is considered here in terms of intellectual performance. Having in mind those EFL teachers who work with young adult students, suggestions are offered for improving EFL literary competence through intervention at the procedural level. The suggestions are based firstly on the idea that the reading of a literary text can be seen as a form of information processing, and secondly on a consideration of the thought processes involved in the understanding of a literary text.