The Role Of Literature In Foreign Language Acquisition

Thomas: Awereness of vocabulary learning strategies among EFL students in Khon Kaen University

In 2014, Professor R. Saengpakdeejit conducted a research on Thai students to examine the types of vocabulary learning strategies they use when studying new vocabulary.

In the introduction it is stated that in Thailand, as in other countries, English has become increasingly important as the “medium of communication”. English is therefore often used by Thai students and teachers both in and out of the classroom. The problem is that Thai students generally encounter a great deal of problems when learning English, mostly with acquiring new vocabulary. This is an immense problem because mastering the vocabulary is generally considered the most crucial

1 Introduction:

Literature has been used to teach foreign languages for a very long time. Thanks to technology, it is now easier than ever to make independent research accessible and easy. A factor that plays a very important role in foreign language acquisition is the role of teachers.

2 Class lecture:

Video documentaries are often used as part of a language teaching class. In the paper, a BBC documentary was shown during a class about 19th century Romantic Poetry. Old textbooks often have false or insufficient information in them, which the professor has to remedy by looking up the missing info himself. Students were asked to compare the documentary with a standard textbook.

The experiment increased the students’ understanding of the subject, in terms of the approach of the Romantic language, idea acquisition and an increase of alternative interpretations of poems. This was caused by the non-standard teaching medium (the documentary).

3 New IT

To analyse how far games, songs and stories help and motivate students in their language acquisition process, researchers investigated 72 young learners of a Taiwanese EFL primary school between the ages of 8 and 11.

In Taiwan, as well as in many other countries, English forms an important part of the curricula of primary and secondary schools. Being solely test-oriented, the education of English language does not succeed in motivating students to enhance their language proficiency outside the classroom. Chern (2003, 427) endorses this claim by saying that students are only motivated to achieve good results and pass their finals, but are not encouraged to improve their competence by themselves. He states that present schooling is predominantly based on short term motivation and therefore students are not inclined to study on their own. To examine if this claim is legitimate, present research investigated if self-study could be conducive to learning English vocabulary and motivating