The Major Factor to Cause the Barriers to Engagement in English Literature in Ch

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Abstract: literature is regarded as one of the most important teaching instruments for students to access the target culture, to develop their linguistic and cultural awareness and to develop their competence with the language. However, English learners in China frequently have difficulty reading and learning from literary texts. In order to make English learners engage in literature learning, the author of this article discusses five classes of barriers to engagement and indicates that teachers should be responsible for the barriers to engagement in English literature teaching.

Key words: barriersengagementEnglish literature

“In China, as with the rest of the world, literature is regarded as one of the most important teaching instruments for students to access the target culture, to develop their linguistic and cultural awareness and to develop their competence with the language”(Li, 1997, pp1).However, students in China frequently have difficulty reading and learning from literary texts, which means that they have encountered barriers to engagement.Smith (2000, pp44-54) reviews five classes of barriers to engagement. After some learning and analysis, I have found that Smith’s barriers to engagement can fit Li ’s Flowers and Thorns.

Inappropriate text selection is also talked about in Li’s Flowers and Thorns.The selected texts are one’s written exclusively before the First World War and are limited to the Chinese Marxist point of view (Mahoney, 1990; Li, 1997).Chinese teachers and students are required to use state-sanctioned textbooks.Take the literature textbooks that I have used in university as an example.The book used in our literature class is History and Anthology of English Literature.The authors and the works taken are from the Anglo-Saxon Period(the year 449) to the early twentieth century.We were required to start from the very beginning and work through to the end.However, the medieval literature is linguistically and socio-culturally difficult for us, especially in our understanding of archaic works and expressions.Actually, most of our classmates had read many English literature works in Chinese even before entering to the university and having literature classes, like Jane Eyre, Tess and The Wuthering heights, but their initial interest is degraded by the inappropriate selection of texts.

Furthermore, the literature textbooks in China over emphasize literary history rather than literary works.Most teachers in China enjoy asking students to remember a string of names of authors, literary works and the social and political situation of each literary period. All of us can easily tell the story of Hamlet even if most of us have never seen it, let alone the original.It seems that we learn English literature merely to pass the examinations or just for literature’s sake but not taking it as an access to learning a language or expanding our world view.Such an approach cannot foster students’ literary competence nor their linguistic capability.

‘In responding to literature, readers are immersed in different places and worlds… In doing so, they draw on their knowledge of real-world cultural context to construct these fictional worlds as cultural contexts’ (Beach, 1998, pp176).Since China enjoys a good reputation for its long traditional love of literature, the Chinese literary tradition had a great impact on English Language Teaching, especially on English literature.Chinese students will always read and analyze English literary works on a Chinese culture basis, which some times results in misunderstanding or distortion.Thus the distinction between English and Chinese culture will be the barrier for students to be engaged in literary works. Some of students’ resistance to multicultural literature stems from their uneasiness with unfamiliar cultural worlds portrayed in these texts (Beach, 1998,182).

Often, it is difficult for a reader from one culture to enter into a text world from another culture.I will take my own experience of reading James Joyce’s work Eveline as an example.I was confused by Eveline’ life and her activities although I have read it for several times, but when we were given an introduction of the culture in Eveline’s society, I began to understand her activities and decisions- People have to follow the rules of their own.They must know what they can do and cannot do under the tradition of their own culture.

Background information seems to be the most pragmatic and essential knowledge in teaching literature.Most of time, students cannot understand the literary works because of the lack of the background information.Take the poem Musee Des Beaux Arts as an example.Most students were totally confused by the theme of the poem, but when we were given some introduction of its background, that is, a painting and the story of Icarus, I became to understand this poem.It is a poem about thinking of life with intertextual allusions to the painting and the story of Icarus.

There are many factors which contribute to result in these barriers to engagement, among which I would like to take the lack of qualified teachers as the major one. Although the teacher acts an important role in teaching literature, who is a guide or a director to help students understand literary works, it is the truth that universities in China always lack qualified teachers.This is also discussed in Li’s Flowers and Thorns when talking about thorns in english literature teaching in China.Li is critical of teachers’ lack of literary knowledge, but I attribute their deficiency in qualification to the lack of teaching skills and methods.In general, teachers depend on explanation, analysis and lecturing.Among those skills and methods, they need to explore and develop more effective and engaging ones, such as Narrative, which is also used in class frequently.

Why narrative?Smith(2000) considers it as a teacher’s ability to offer a brief condensed narrative and to elicit student’s own culture and personal narratives can serve many purposes in the teaching of literature.She also suggests that such an approach can overcome the heavy burden of background material in a textbook, offer the big picture-the whole story - when only an extract is available in the textbook, activate students’ own prior knowledge, create a ‘sphere of interculturality’ which links ‘student world’ and ‘text world’ by drawing or students’ own personal and cultural narratives, explain culturally distant background material and essential intertextual allusions, repair misunderstanding and help students to keep track of characters and events in a long and complicated literary narrative.

Smith(2000) has proposed a set of pedagogical narrative framings, loosely related to Reid’s (1992) pragmatic typology of framings (circumtextual, extratextual, intratextual, intertextual). Smith’s narrative framings have proved useful in promoting engagement with complex literary texts.

Circumtextual narrative framings include the chronological narrative shaped by the story of English literature from a historical perspective, the curriculum narrative shaped by the physical features of the textbook and the order, selection and arrangement of components of the course and the pedagogical narrative of the story created by and creating the lesson, through planning and interactive implementation.The extratextual narrative framings include the background stories of historical, political and social context and the literary background stories of period, writer life and works.The intratextual narrative framings mean the stories with the text (situational, episodic, developmental, symbolic) and the shaping of meaning and interpretation through linguistic features and text organization.The intertextual narrative framings stand for cultural, symbolic, mythological, moral and spiritual narratives which are intrinsic to the text, but which have affiliations with other texts, narratives of identification and response, created by the exploration of students’ personal and cultural stories and comparative narratives with other literary forms, other artistic expression and both Chinese and English literature (Smith, 2000).

Let’s take Wordsworth’s poem She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways as an example to see how a literature teacher can use narrative to help students engage with literary works.The teacher can first give students some extratextual narrative for the poem, such as the introduction of the author Wordsworth-his life, his family, his writing style and the period he was in.Background facts can be woven into an engaging story: He came from a North of England family, sound and health in its moral tone, and vigorous physically.Losing his parents early in life, he was left to the care of uncles who discharged their trust in a praiseworthy manner.He went to school in his ninth year at Hawkshead, where he had the happy days.He was free to go about as he pleased, and he roamed early and late over the mountains.The healthy out-of-door life hardened the fibers of his sturdy frame and kept him vigorous, and the constant sight of nature in the wondrous beauty of the Lake District awoke love and reverence in him.He enjoyed the sports of hunting, skating, and rowing.Little by little, the glories of Nature grew upon him, until his soul seemed flooded with unutterable delight when in her presence.Since he has such kind of experiences, his poetry, was deeply influenced by his love of nature, especially by the actual sights and scenes of the Lake Country, in which he spent most of his mature life. As a profoundly earnest and sincere thinker, he displayed a high seriousness comparable, at times, to Milton's but tempered with tenderness and a love of simplicity.It is also easy for people to find that Wordsworth's earlier work shows the poetic beauty of commonplace things.

He belongs to the Romantic Period. Since students have known some historical and social background of the poem, the teacher can direct students to get circumtextual narrative framings.The poem is an ELEGY, a type of English poem that has no distinctive structure.‘An elegy is a mournful, lonely-feeling poem, usually in the form of an expression of grief for a dead person or persons, or because of the loss of a loved object or place.The mood is serious and melancholic and the rhythm is usually slow moving in keeping with the content of the poem’ (Smith, 2000).In this way, students can get some ideas about the topic and the theme of the poem even before reading it.

The next step for the teacher should be intratextual narrative framings.On the base of students’ extratextual framings and circumtextual framings of the poem, the teacher then can introduce students to the analysis of the poem. By the imaginative description of the miserable life after Lucy’s death, students will find that ‘the poem is about LOVE and LOSS, but not a special LOVE and LOSS.‘In no way can it be seen as an autobiography, it is merely the poet’s creation of a fictive experience; Wordsworth’s fellow poet Coleridge thought that in the LUCY POEMS, Wordsworth was trying to imagine the emotional consequences of his beloved sister, Dorothy’s death; Wordsworth is reflecting on the sadness that comes with the loss of childhood innocence when the child is one with nature’ (Smith, 2000).So far, it seems that students have got enough information and thinking of the poem.But in order to make students more engaged in the poem and to find out the potential meaning of it, the teacher can give students an intertextual narrative by the comparisons between the five LUCY POEMS.

Narrative is only a partial solution that is fit for the lack of qualified teachers in teaching literature in China.If we want to get rid of the barriers to engagement, we need more time and do more study to find the pragmatic solution to all kinds of barriers, which can be effectively used in China, because only in this way can Chinese students make an improvement in learning literature and so that to develop their English capability as a second language.

References

[1]Smith, E. (2000) Narrative Framings. Melbourne. M.U.P

[2]Almasi, J. Mckeown, M. and Beck, I. (1996) The Nature of Engaged Reading in Classroom Discussion of Literature. Journal of literary Research, vol.28, no1

[3]Spires, H. Donley, J. (1998) Prior Knowledge Activation: Inducing Engagement With Informational Texts. Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 90, no. 2

[4]Nystrand, M. and Gamoran, A. (1991) Instructional Discourse, Student Engagement, and Literature Achievement. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 25, No. 3

[5]Li Mingsheng (1997) English Literature Teaching in China: Flowers and Thorns. The Weaver: A Forum for New Ideas in Education, No. 2