ESL students and literature

By: hsubba Date: 08/14/2007 17:35:16

Here’s my rant of the week:

ESL students can love literature, too!

Recently, someone remarked to me that he hated having to change or add extra information to help ESL students understand classic literature. This person said he loved literature growing up and it’s wrong to change it to foster ESL learning because it ruins the literature. He feels that making the literature available to ESL students cancels out the merits and the art of the literature itself.

This brings me to another point. We have to imagine ourselves learning another language to appreciate an ESL student’s situation. As a foreigner living in Japan, I think I COULD appreciate classic Japanese literature if it was enhanced for me to understand. I guess it goes into a deeper discussion of what literature means and to whom it has this meaning.

If we are enhancing text for classroom purposes, to teach culture, and to inspire the love of reading, what’s wrong with this? Besides, why should ESL students only read ESL texts? That is not congruent with academic findings in the field of Applied Linguistics. Literature has so much beauty within, just like the person I talked to has fond memories of learning about in his own school experience. Why, then, not share it with all students and not just a few?