BRITISH LITERATURE TEACHING: TOWARDS AN INTEGRATIVE APPROACH

Abstract

The present work has been interested in finding tentative reasons for third year students’ underachievement in the British literature module at the English Language Department, University of Oran. Following the assumption that this deficit might be due to their lack of fluency and self-efficacy in writing, an investigation has been undertaken by implementing a number of research tools to the subjects selected. The analysis of the results suggests that the students are motivated and interested in studying British literature.Yet, their inability to write efficiently their ideas and interpretations makes them more concerned with getting ready made meanings on the literary text concerned.In fact, this lack of writing fluency in English contributes in making the students’ ideas not trust-worthy and inhibits their attempt to reveal them in writing their exam answer.Accordingly, students’lack of creativity and self-expression is more likely to make from their assessment negative and frustrating. Furthermore,the results obtained from the present error analysis has unveiled that the students did not express their views and ideas on the literary text concerned ,but rather relied mostly on retelling the story’s events.Hence, even in doing so, they made errors both at the content and form levels which affect their written product. The students’ errors are embodied in their non-mastery of grammatical rules such as tenses, punctuation and sentence construction ,besides their inability to organize their ideas using paragraghs and rhetorical structures.Moreover, analysis of the students’exam answer sheets has also revealed their lack of the writing skills necessary for argumentative essays which entails explaining, exploring facts related to the studied literary text, commenting on them and generalizing to other context voicing their opinion and personal experiences. It is important to realize, however, that these students have never been given a series of lectures in the methodology of essay writing about literary texts.Thus, In addition to their difficulties in communicating their ideas fluently in writing, their lack of awareness as well as training in writing a literary analysis may contribute to their poor performance in the British literature course. 131 Therefore, this work points out at the need to train literature students not only in writing about the literary texts presented in the curriculum but also in reading and interacting with them to enable these students have a better chance of success in the British literature course.Moreover, to achieve such an objective an approach to British literature which integrates the language, cultural and personal based approaches has been suggested in the last part of this work. The main objective from integrating these approaches is to help students get benefit from studying literature by enriching their knowledge of the foreign language and culture, raising their motivation and appreciation of it.Indeed, with the right selection of literary texts this approach is more likely to promote students’ language use, critical thinking in dealing with literary texts and creativity in expressing their responses.To develop students’writing fluency and feeling of efficacy in using language various tasks can be implemented within this approach as the present work has suggested. Ultimately, it is undeniably true that British literature teaching can have many rewarding effects on students in foreign or second language context.However,the question that still be addressed is how to make this actual with students who have not yet developed reading and writing proficiency in English. It must be noted then that not all sides of the problem have been explored in this work as some important questions remain unanswered. Among them: what strategies students need to write critical essays about literary texts?.To what extent can students’lack of drafting affect their writing performance?.What is the relationship between reading comprehension of literary masterpieces and students’ performance in the exam?.How students’ schema affects their writing product ?.Finally, what kind of assessment students need to get much more confidence in writing their ideas.