The Role of Literature in EFL Classroom from an EIL Perspective
Quite recently, there has been an accumulated body of beliefs and claims advocating the beneficial role of literature as a legitimate vehicle through which a foreign language can be taught. Though this argument seems to be alluring, it can be problematic and target of much criticism if an English as an International Language (EIL) perspective is adopted. This paper first elaborates on the advantages of employing literature in EFL classroom. Then it furthers to argue that from an EIL perspective the fact that literature is highly culturally loaded, can potentially pose a threat to the cultural integrity of the learners. The final argumentation is that if literature is aimed to be employed for teaching a foreign language, it should not be monocultural literature, but it should be in the form of multicultural and multinational literature, otherwise, becoming too preoccupied with monocultural literature, in this sense, will culminate into more linguistic imperialism, self-marginalization, self-alienation, cultural colonialization and hegemony.
Enhancing Literary Competence Through Critical Oriented Reading Strategies
This study investigates the impact of critical oriented reading strategies on Iranian EFL male and female students’ literary competence (LC). In so doing, 109 homogenized male and female college students of English Literature were screened out of 160 participants due to administering Oxford Placement Test (OPT) among them. The selected participants were randomly assigned into critical (experimental) and non-critical (control) group. They were subsequently divided into male and female groups. All groups were given a novel, Jane Eyre, to read. Then the subjects were given the same pre-post test in the form of LC questionnaire aimed to determine their level of LC before and after the intervention. During the intervention, participants in the critical group were taught and encouraged to use critical reading strategies (CRSs). However, the non-critical group was taught the conventional method of reading. The results indicated a significant difference between learners’ LC before and after the intervention. However the LC difference was not statistically significant in term of gender. This study provides more evidence for the importance of CRSs that apparently empower students to know, explain, analyze and answer the questions that arise in a text which leads eventually to a progress in LC of the learners.
Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes
Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern scholars navigating the often competing demands of late sixteenth century manuscript and print culture. This dissertation is, in part, an attempt to catalogue and document the extent of Parkerian Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions. Temporally displaced from their source texts, Parker and his scribes directly modified many of the medieval manuscripts they recovered by editing, rebinding, cropping, and annotating them according to their own interpretive desires and publication needs. These transcriptions place Parker’s early modern scribes into the textual community of early medieval scribal culture, but their printed manuscript editions are an attempt to bring medieval documents into contemporary discourse. They developed new typefaces modeled on manuscript exemplars and attempted to reframe the printed version of a medieval text as an authoritative surrogate