Literature presents valuable language exposure and leads to different types of enrichment (Collie and Slater, 1987)

VALUABLE AUTHENTIC MATERIAL: a material which is 'important' in some way, due to the fact that it says something about varied fundamental human issues. Any literary work can transcend both, time and culture to speak directly to a reader in another country or a different period of history. Literature is 'authentic' material because it is not fashioned for the specific purpose of teaching a language. Recent course materials have quite rightly incorporated many 'authentic' samples of language - for example, travel timetables, city plans, pamphlets, cartoons, advertisements, newspaper or magazine articles. In reading literary texts, students have also to cope with language intended for native speakers and thus they gain additional familiarity with many different linguistic uses, forms and conventions of the written mode: with irony, exposition, argument, narration, and so on. All this leads unavoidably to be in contact with cultural information


CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: For many of our students (even for many of us) a visit or an extended stay in the target culture is just not possible. For all such people (let’s concentrate on learners), more indirect routes can be taken into consideration, for instance radio programmes, films or videos, newspapers, and, last but not least, literary works. It is true of course that the 'world' of a novel, play, or short story is a created one, yet, it offers a full and vivid context in which characters from many social backgrounds can be depicted. Reading the literature of a historical period is, after all, one of the ways we have to help us imagine what life was like in that other foreign territory, i.e. the country's past


LANGUAGE ENRICHMENT: While there is little doubt that extensive reading increases a learner's receptive vocabulary and facilitates transfer to a more active form of knowledge, it is sometimes objected that literature does not give learners the kind of vocabulary they really need. The objection to literature on the grounds of lexical appropriacy, thus, has some validity, but it needs not be an overriding one if teachers make a judicious choice of the text to be read, considering it as a counterpoise and supplement to other materials.
On the positive side, literature provides a rich context in which indi­vidual lexical or syntactical items are made more memorable. It triggers learners to make inferences from linguistic clues and it is an excellent prompt for oral work.


PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT: when coping with literary works, it is necessary to consider how a language operates both as a rule-based system and as a socio-semantic system. Very often, the process of learning is essentially analytic, piecemeal, and, at the level of the personality, fairly superficial. Engaging imaginatively with literature enables learners to shift the focus of their attention beyond the more mechanical aspects of the foreign language system. The language becomes 'transparent' as long as the reader is well-motivated, and as long as the experience of engaging with literature is kept sufficiently interesting, varied and non-directive to let the reader feel that he or she is taking possession of a previously unknown territory.

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