Introduction

Literature in language teaching has a long pedigree. It was a fundamental part of foreign language teaching in the ‘classical humanist’ paradigm, where an understanding of the high culture and thought expressed through literature took precedence over mere competence in using the language. Indeed, in the teaching of European classical languages, such as Greek and Latin, the literature was virtually all that remained of the language.

This central role of literature was carried over into TESL/TEFL in the early part of the twentieth century. In many parts of the world, such as India, it remains integral to the teaching of the language to this day. However, as the TESL/TEFL profession developed a more sophisticated understanding of how languages are learned, and as the demand for English shifted its focus from the small-scale production of scholarly elites to the mass production of large numbers of functionally competent users of the language, literature came to be regarded as, at best, an irrelevance and, at worst, positively harmful.

Among other things, this resulted in an unproductive debate between the ‘ancients’, staunch supporters of Literatures (with a capital L), and the ‘moderns’, devotees of linguistic structures, functions and the like, who would have no truck with literature. To some extent this divide continues, especially at the college/university level. In more recent times, however, there has been a gradual rehabilitation of literature and its value for language teaching. Nonetheless, the role of literature in language teaching remains contentious, owing to widespread differences in interpretation of the precise nature of that role.