Literature- a Provider of Social and Cultural Models

All teachers are conscious of the fact that using literary texts in their classes allows
them to approach and work with themes that are in the students centre of conflicts and
difficulties. Likewise, they are also aware that a literary text makes their students reflect and
leads them to look for the deepest meaning of the message given by the author, making them
look for their inner self in that quest. So, teaching and reading literature is gratifying, for both
teachers and students, as this experience will probably lead them to a better world, where
tolerance and sharing are highly valued. But this kind of teaching demands from teachers hard
work and excellent interpretation ability, because they will function as a link between text and
students, helping them find their way in and out of the text. Each teacher is the pacifying
voice that guides students on their path to discovery.
Elaine Showalter (2003) argues that a literary text is what gets taught to students, and
this literary text includes canon and contemporary authors. According to the author, the main
purpose of teaching literature is to teach our students how to read, analyse and interpret a
literary text, helping them in their ability to read between the lines.
These activities make students think for themselves, something that is essential in their
future lives, at several levels. This is why teachers, in the first place, have to pay attention to
their students needs and adjust their goals accordingly, but without losing their integrity and
identity. The surrounding environment inside the classroom has to be worked on too, in order
to make learning effective. Thus, the main role of teachers is to help their students to think
critically and motivation plays an important part in this kind of learning. An aspect to point
out here is that students have their own learning rhythm and they need theoretical and
practical work, including clear objectives and a continuous assessment of their development
throughout classes.
Showalter also proposes a list of competencies and skills (for example, how to read
figurative language, how to detect cultural assumptions, how to read closely, how to think
creatively) that join what we want our students to learn through literature. We can assume that
these objectives show a new concept of the literary text as a starting point in the development
of the human being in its understanding of the world that surrounds him/her and in dealing
with this same world. As said, learning is more effective when students have access to models
and examples from which they can work with.
 As well as literature exposes children to worlds filled with heroes, scoundrels, new
friends, and new possibilities, stories provide opportunities to embark on explorations of
experience from various perspectives. Great books offer opportunities for role taking, higher
level thinking, character impersonating, and, from a different perspective, rich discussions of
the authors intentional message.

The education which is based on social skill instruction is a proactive, positive

intervention designed to develop in students positive behaviours which would facilitate the
teaching and learning processes themselves and a successful integration within a larger or
smaller community. Skills training, a common model for social skills instruction, typically
involves social modelling, behavioural rehearsal, and behaviour transfer. To be more specific,
the teacher shows the learner how to perform the skill, gives the student the opportunities to
practice the behaviour and then, sets the norms and structures conditions for the learned
behaviours to get transferred to other times and conditions.

By means of original and recorded or written models, literature may be a source of

symbolic models useful in helping children and adolescents identify adaptive ways to respond
to various social situations. Books have an added advantage in that they enable the reader or
observer to access the inner thoughts, intentions, reasons and emotions that surround a
particular set of behaviours.

What is more, literature can help children to see things from the perspective of others,
to develop empathy not only for characters in books but also for others in real life situations.
These heightened levels of empathy or compassion would likely trigger prosocial behaviours
in everyday situations. Another advantage is that children, as well as adults, enjoy stories; and
this pleasure can become a useful means for drawing their attention and actively engaging
students in discussions, debates or enactments related to some critical behaviour.

Social skills can and should be taught directly, researchers say. Reading or listening to
stories alone will not teach social skills; rather, these literacy experiences are tools that can be
an integral part of the process for teaching/learning important social behaviours. The
importance of literature in childrens personal and social development has been noted by
many researchers who expressed their faith in the power of literature to change lives and
states.
In fact, most syllabuses have a section entitled either objectives or learning outcomes.
In these sections teachers present what students should be able to do at the end of each
literature course; information which reveals the literary literacy skills that students are
supposed to be able to activate at the end of each course. Although the information under the
heading objectives is sometimes vague (e.g. the students should be able to analyse a literary
text), the content analysis makes it possible clearly to identify the literary literacy skills
lecturers expect students to activate.
Above all, teachers expect the students to interact actively, attentively and reflectively
with the text and with one another in order to create a viable hypothesis of meaning that will
render coherence and a certain unity of understanding to the text and bring forth an
interpretation: they must be able to do textual analysis; must be able to read critically; must be
able to read primary and secondary bibliographies critically and must be able to read key-texts
critically.
Furthermore, teachers expect the students to be able to contextualize literary texts and
their authors both historically and culturally and to carry out intertextual readings: they must
be able to place texts in an historical and cultural context, must be able to place the authors in
an historical and cultural context, must be able to read in an intertextual and comparative way,
attending to several art and cultural expressions. Finally, teachers expect the student to be able
to look for and organize information from reference bibliographies: he/she must do and
organize bibliographical research.
Taking into account the most frequently used skills, literary literacy can be defined as
the competency to amplify individual self-reflective interaction with a literary text in order to
produce an interpretation. In this process, the student must activate a web of specific skills
that reflect the literacy practices. According to Green (cited in Harmer, 2009) these specific
skills can be divided into three dimensions that should always intersect one another: a critical,
cultural and operational dimension.
The approach of a literary text from a critical dimension implies that students engage
with a literary text in an attentive, information-supported and creative way. They must
recognise that a literary text is brought into existence by the convergence of reader and text; a
convergence that is regulated by a set of instructions: some of these are determined in the text,
and others are to be determined by the student/reader during the reading process. As a result,
when reading a literary text, the student must make predictions about future events and also
recognise those predictions, as well as other thoughts and emotions, regarding events,
characters and the plot. The skill to read critically also means that the student must draw upon
extra textual interpretative strategies and conventions (those that the lecturer and the academic
community have established to perform the act of interpretation). These strategies must be
taken into account, though they do not define entirely the interpretation of a text.
Doing a textual analysis means that the students must be able to decompose the whole
text into its components. The student must be able to pay close attention to the words chosen
by the author, the order in which they are presented, their rhythm, their sound and the effects
they produce in the reader. It is important that analysis of the textual components is not
completely set in the shade of the readers subjectivity. The student must be able to recognize
that a literary text is a creative construction of a universe, with unique rules, in which
sequences of words may acquire new and multiple interpretations; thus, it is up to him/her to
expand what is explicit and what is implicit in the text, in order to transform the text into a
coherent whole. Therefore, the student must be able to identify the texts literary genre, its
thematic nucleus, its unique features and, eventually, the authorial intention (Showalter,
2003).
From a cultural dimension, literary texts and their authors are to be placed in a
historical and cultural context. Firstly, this means the student must be able to recognize,
identify and reflect on the system of living ideas systems, i.e. the culture the text belongs to.
Secondly, it means the students must appeal to their background knowledge or extra textual
information (such as biographical data). Moreover, in order to establish connections between
texts or works of art, the students must activate their previous knowledge.
From an operational dimension, students must do, organize, and display the results of
bibliographical research about the text, its author, its context and/or prior interpretations of the
literary text. This means the student must be able to select, interpret and present such
information and its bibliographical references according to academic conventions (Showalter,
2003). Ultimately, the student will write a coherent text to bring out an interpretation of a
literary text for a literature class.
Nowadays, it seems obvious that the traditional stress on textual analysis and close
reading is decreasing in favour of the skill to analyse the social, cultural and historical forces
that ended up shaping the writers vision and his/her literary work, in favour of the skill to
convene other artistic works to the process of literary interpretation, in favour of the skill to
write a coherent literary analysis essay, and in favour of the skill to use effectively the
information brought together by the bibliographical research process. As a consequence,
literary interpretation is currently not confined to the words in text, their order, their sound,
and their rhythm, but rather to take into account the reciprocal relations of readers, authors,
texts, and context (Barton, 2009).
 In the interpretation process the wide ranges of skills associated to both the literary
literacy and social literacy are to be used, maintained and reinforced. However, it is important
to state that the student is not expected to activate the whole range of these skills in a single
interpretative act. This would be both unlikely to happen and unwelcome, considering that
each reader accesses the text from a different perspective, emphasizing certain aspects of the
text and forgetting others. Moreover, this will be done at different times, in different places,
under different conditions.
Bibliography

Barton, D. Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language, Blackwell,

2009
Harmer, J. The Practice of English Language Teaching, Fourth Edition Pearson
Longman, 2009
Showalter, E. Teaching Literature, Blackwell,2003