A Study On Teaching Of Literary Texts In High School EFL Classroom

Literary text reading plays an important part in English language education.Literary text reading is not only beneficial to improving students' language competence,but also has many other educational values such as developing students' cultural awareness,thinking quality and humanistic competence.The national English Curriculum Standards for High Schools(2003)clearly stipulates requirements of literary text reading and appreciation.However,the current teaching situation of English literary texts in high school classroom is far from being satisfactory and needs to be improved in many aspects.This study conducts an investigation into the current situation of literary text teaching in high school EFL classroom in terms of teachers' viewpoints,teaching ability and teaching methods among sixty high school teachers in Zhejiang province by means of questionnaire,classroom observation and interview.Research questions of this study are as follows.What is high school teachers' attitude towards the teaching of English literary texts? How do teachers carry out their teaching of English literary texts in high school EFL classroom? What are the major problems in the teaching of English literary texts in high school EFL classroom? It can be concluded from the research results that teachers agree that English literary text teaching is of great significance to cultivate high school students' humanistic competence and so on.However,there exist many problems in classroom teaching of English literary text in high schools: the contents of literary texts in NSEFC books are not close to students' life and the quantity is relatively small;many English teachers are not confident in their literature appreciation and teaching ability;linguistic knowledge and linguistic competence are overemphasized in class;it lacks evaluation of literary text teaching effect;it lacks teacher training about literary text teaching.In view of these existing problems in high school English literary text teaching,this study puts forward some corresponding suggestions on the contents,teaching methods,evaluation and teacher training.