Teaching Literature In The English Classroom For High School Learners

The correlation between literature and language teaching is a question at issue in foreign language education. In the West, literature has always been a key element in foreign language teaching, while in China, although this was also true in the past, literature has no longer been a key element and it has almost been eliminated from the foreign language class ever since the Communicative Teaching Approach was widely adopted.Today, as China's education attaches great importance to the cultivation of humanistic qualities, literature is once again set as one of the major learning tasks of the secondary foreign language education. The latest Curriculum Criteria of Secondary Education stipulates literary appreciation as an optional course. Under such circumstances, this thesis is to argue for the rebirth of the literary element in the secondary English teaching and explore the functions of literature in the language class with an attempt to facilitate students' acquirement of language skills, cultivate their humanistic spirits and develop their overall qualities.The thesis first carries out a questionnaire concerning the status quo of literary elements in the secondary English class. The result shows that the students are poor at appreciating literary works, as resulted from the teachers' ignorance of literature and the misleading NEMT. The thesis then analyzes the problems exposed by the questionnaire and intends to find out solutions.To solve the problems, the thesis turns to humanistic education thoughts and cultural linguistics to seek out theoretical backup, concluding that the major task of the current humanistic education is to make an integral person, and literature in the secondary English class can be the very vehicle to improve the students' personalities as well as their linguistic competence. Besides, it suggests that China's EFL teaching should learn from the Chinese teaching, getting the most out of the foreign language teaching which may serve both as an access to linguisticachievements and that of the integral education.This thesis also provides an experiment with the teaching of literature in the secondary English class, in which the author explores the objectives, contents and methods, forming a new teaching pattern. In the end, the author summarizes some teaching principles, raises some reflections and makes suggestions for further research work.