M. (Ed.) (1987) Interactive Language Teaching. Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press.
Rivers, W.M. (1987) The centrality of interaction. In: Interactive Language Teaching. Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, pp. 4-16.
Robinson, G. L.N. (1987) Culturally diverse speech styles. In: Interactive Language Teaching. Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle,
Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, pp. 141-154.
Via, R. (1987) “The magic if” of theatre: enhancing language learning through drama. In: Interactive Language Teaching. Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, pp. 110-123.
c. Dramatic texts
Beckett, S. (1969) Waiting for Godot. London: Faber and Faber.
Ionesco, E. (1958) The Bald Prima Donna. (Translated by D. Watson). London: John Calder (Publishers) LTD.
Ketley, Ch. (1996) My Mother Said I Never Should. London.
Shaw, B. (1965 ) Pygmalion. London: Paul Hamlyn.
78
Raising language awareness and cultural awareness
by using literary texts in the process of foreign
language learning in Slovakia
Mária Kostelníková
Printed text is still prevalent in the process of foreign language learning in Slovakian schools, in spite of the development and spread of other media. In general, a decreasing interest in reading can be observed, not only among pupils of secondary schools, but among other young adults (even university students) as well. I have been working with our students, future English teachers with the aim to find ways of stimulating young people to get acquainted with literature and to increase interest in reading. In our didactic course we have been investigating ways to stimulate young people’s interest in literature with the help of literary texts and thereby increase their interest in reading while initiating genuine dialogue: communication on interesting topics. If we study literature on communicative methodology in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s we can observe a clear neglect of the integration of literary texts and literature into English foreign language teaching.
To address the problem of and obtain data on the integration of work with literary texts in the process of foreign language teaching in our schools, we addressed 30 teachers and 385 pupils at secondary schools. (Some questions from the inquiry are included in the appendix.) The rationale of the survey was to get information about the reality in our schools in the field of integrating literary texts into the process of teaching English as a foreign language. From the results of our inquiry we see that the majority of teachers and pupils would like to read and work with literary texts more often than they do at present. To explain this neglect some objective reasons like out-dated textbooks,
accessibility of books, and copying were considered crucial. The teachers would welcome a publication of literary texts with a variety of genres, styles, authors and topics produced in Slovakia and distributed to various schools.
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Relating to these facts the main issues investigated in this paper are the following:
•
the place/position of literary texts in Slovakian schools – based upon the results of a survey;
•
the importance of text in foreign language learning with special regard to literary texts;
•
criteria for the selection of literary texts in the context of Slovakian schools;
•
poetry and metaphor in the language classroom;
•
nature of activities and tasks with literary texts in communicative
language teaching;
•
strategies for overcoming cultural problems when reading literary texts;
•
list of activities with literary texts initiating personal response;
•
dialogue with poems – examples.
The role of text in the language learning process
In the context of teaching foreign languages in Slovakia, texts basically function as:
•
a source of vocabulary, lexical units and grammatical structures;
•
a source of information about the culture, history, literature and country of the target language and the language itself;
•
a source of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation of the learner.
This more or less traditional distinction is based on the fact that the findings of the Prague Linguistic Circle – later referred to as the Prague School, which was founded by Vilem Mathesius in the 1920s, decisively influenced the teaching of modern languages in Czechoslovakia. The theoretic studies were rooted in the so-called Geneva structuralism, mainly de Saussure’s teaching.
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The Prague linguists stressed that language exists as a system in relation to individual utterances, which in fact carry out that system. According to them every component of the language system can only be understood in its relation to the whole. The language system has various levels or partial strata, e.g. the sound stratum (the Prague School dealt at the beginnings mostly with functional phonology of contemporary language), the morphological, syntactical, stylistic and lexical strata. Each language phenomenon has its function which
corresponds to the informational and expressive needs of the speaker or society respectively. Parts of the language can have a different function in the spoken/oral standard of the language and in its written norm. Equally important is the function and choice of lingual means in various language styles, according to the needs of the speaker (writer) with regard to the listener (reader), in the given context of the social condition of the communication.
Especially important for the learning of foreign languages is the knowledge and information gained from the confrontation of two languages by analytical comparison (not genetic comparison) built on functional and structural analysis.
It was stressed that the characteristic features of language will stand out more clearly if a language is compared with some other language which is not genetically closely allied to it – e.g. English can be more profitably compared with Slovak than with another Germanic language.