Importance Of Literature In English Literature

Teaching English as a foreign Language to Arab students, more specifically, to the Sudanese ones requires from EFL teachers to devote a considerable amount of time and effort in different areas of the learning process. Improving students ' performance and competence in the four basic skills of English (speaking, reading, listening and writing) has for a long time, been the main concern of the teachers in classrooms; in the center of these four skills is learning grammar rules. Therefore English literature has been neglected in the learning process. Lazar, (1993: 19) states

“Literature may have a wider educational function in the classroom in that it can help to stimulate the imagination of our students, to develop their critical abilities and to increase their emotional awareness. If we ask our students to respond personally to the texts we give them, they will become increasingly confident about expressing their own ideas and emotions in English. They will feel empowered by their ability to grapple with the text and its language, and to relate it to the values and traditions of their own society.” Furthermore, the Language of literature considered as the special tool for distinguishing the differences between language genres such as (a dialogue, a tale, and a poetic style based on the figurative language). Thus, literature provides a means of escape from the problems of our daily life by taking the readers away from the real world and its problems into a different one, at