Inclusion of the filmed versions of literary works in teaching literature An effective strategy to foreign cultures’ familiarity

Abstract

Teaching British and American literature has constituted an enormous and a sharp challenge to teachers of English as a foreign language, so far. Actually, many teachers find themselves in part obliged to teach students suffering not only the linguistic incompetence, but the cultural unfamiliarity of the literary text as well, whether the latter is a novel, a play, or a short story. Highlighting the cultural framework plays a major role in understanding the literary work. The overall aim of this paper is to show how helpful and rewarding is the combination of both the filmed and written versions of certain literary works to realize full comprehension of the literary content, mainly the cultural one.
The paper has discussed the importance of integrating the cultural knowledge in EFL learning and literature classroom by having students revealed their perceptions of the target culture through the implementation of movies which are considered very motivating and culturally fruitful. As a matter of fact, the inclusion of movies in the EFL literature classroom has proved to be an effective strategy to elucidate this class and transform the boring task of literature learning into an entertaining and amusing one. This paper has shown also that the more knowledge and understanding of the target culture is enlightened and gained, the more an increase in the students’ literary knowledge and linguistic competence of the target language, which is used in the movie by its native speakers, is expected. In Last of all, gained cultural knowledge not only develops students’ language abilities for effective and appropriate communication within cultural contexts of the target language and culture, and their capacity to engage into intercultural situations, but free students’ critical minds and creative imagination to think.