The effective reader should master certain skills and strategies which allow him to convert the words on the page of a literary work into literary meanings. He knows certain conventions about how a literary text should be read and understood.
Literary competence includes a number of skills and sub-skills which the teacher should identify in order to plan his lessons and to offer his students clear procedures and techniques for dealing with literary texts. [1]
The literary skills high school students would mostly benefit from are:
1. The ability to recognize and decode:
- Figures of speech such as: metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, epithet, apostrophe, oxymoron, metonymy
- Narrative and poetic devices such as: plot, story, character, point-of-view, setting; irony, satire, paradox; assonance, alliteration, rhyme, rhythm
- Specific text features such as: theme, style
- Literary trends such as: Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism
- Literary forms such as: the diary, the epigram, the heroic poem, the mock-heroic poem, the ode, the sonnet
- Literary genres such as: novel, play, short-story, poem, sketch
2. The ability to use literary notions in order to interpret the text
3. The ability to produce a personal response to the text
Although the meta-language to which the above-mentioned terms belong seems to be quite difficult for our students, the literary terminology provides them with tools for identifying, interpreting and appreciating the value of the distinctive features in a literary text. Besides, the learners feel more secure to express personal opinions about the text if they master the appropriate language.
Another argument in favour of learning and using literary terminology is a more pragmatic one – the students are expected to be familiar with it in exams.
[1] Brumfit, C., Carter, S. – Literature and Language Teaching, Heinemann, 1983
Gower, R., Pearson, H. – Reading Literature, Heinemann,1985
Widdowson, H. G. – Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature, OUP, 1990
Literary Competency and the Linguistic competency both are co-related and can not be separated from each other. there are several other possibilities in the development of these two major terms in field of education especially teaching literature in India.
Hi, i think acquisition of cultural and cross-cultural knowledge via literary textx could be placed under literary competence. Also, with the addition of the above, literary competence then could be recategorised as low level lit competency and high level com…
Thanks a bunch, Melania, for the article. I believe it would be a great reference point for me when I begin to write my Masters thesis.
souhila bouk
Of course the teacher’s role is to provide her students with a number of skills to inhance the their literary competence. I think critical theories are the best way to do that since they are concidered ‘an ambrella term’ which enable the learner as well as the teacher to see the literary work from different angles
I find this topic very interesting.
thank you Melania
Dear Melania, your topics about literature in the CR are so great and I think they will help me in my PhD, thanks a lot.
Yes,I agree with the above opinion.Our students need to have a literary competence that help them while approaching a given literary text. A novice reader might be confused with ,for example the language of poems,where much of the structures and the lexical items are deviant from the norm of language use our students are provided with from the very beginning.However,if he/she has the necessary exposure to patterns of literary language the confusion won’t occur. But one important point to remember is that our students need the necessary linguistic input in addition to those figures of speech and other issues in literature. Littlewood (in Brumfit and Carter 1987:181) affirms that “the linguistic structures are,ofcourse,the gate way or barrier to other levels,and it is fruitless to expect pupils to appreciate literary works for which they are not linguistically ready”.
I appreciate the blogger for initiating this discussion.
Thanks!
Thank you for reading me, Ahmed!
Please, feel free to visit me again and leave your comments!
Best wishes for the new year!
Melania