The Effectiveness of Teaching Language through Literature: An Inquiry into the Teaching of English at Tertiary Level

Abstract

The present English is considered as the most dominant language and teaching English is being given the supreme priority in every discipline all over the globe. To cope with this global trend, most of the private universities in Bangladesh offer English foundation Course (EFC) to the students of different disciplines with a view to enhancing their communicative skills in English language. However, the syllabus of EFC varies in different universities. Most of the universities follow a grammatical syllabus where literature components are avoided considering them useless in language teaching and learning. On the other hand, in some of these universities, literature is used in the classes of EFC. The reason behind integrating literature components in the classes is that literature can make a language class interactive and an interactive class can obviously improve communicative competence. Many researchers have already explored "how" literature should be used in teaching English language. However, no attempt has yet been taken to establish the efficacy of the teaching English language by using literature components. So, I have decided to conduct a descriptive research to establish the effectiveness of teaching English through literature by describing the existing phenomena of the teaching of English in EFC.