East meets west : literature for crosscultural understanding.

Abstract

For almost two decades, literature, which had played an essential role in foreign language teaching in many countries for many years, has been excluded in language classrooms. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among scholars and educators, in both China and the West, in reviving literature as a means of acquiring language proficiency. But, this revival has been rather slanted towards the linguistic and literary elements of literature, while the inherent socio-cultural value of literature has been little discussed or explored. This dissertation seeks to analyze the relationship between culture and literature in second language acquisition and to provide, through illustrations of literary texts, a theoretical framework for teaching literature with the aim of acquiring crosscultural understanding