Literary Language and CFL Pedagogy

Yanfang Tang, Ph.D., Associate Professor

The College of William and Mary

In recent years, there has been a growing consensus among many CFL teaching professionals that favors journalistic writings to literary works as teaching materials, dismissing the latter as being impractical, unrealistic and improper for second language pedagogy. On the other hand, while the ACTFL proficiency guidelines define narration, description, argumentation and hypothesis as advanced level foreign language skills, the vast majority of CFL “advanced” students are either unable to perform these function-based tasks or perform them at the intermediate or even beginning levels. To this author, one major factor contributing to this intricate phenomenon lies in the very selection of teaching materials and in the preparation and delivery of these materials. This author strongly endorses and recommends the use of literary writings at the advanced level. The primary arguments of this paper are, first, literary language (wenxue yuyan 文学语言) and everyday language (richang yuyan 日常语言) are of essentially the same language types and, despite its surface characteristics, the former is not more complicated or deviated from normalcy than the latter in expressing ideas and feelings. Second, literary writings provide the best source of language use models that can be adopted to train students’ linguistic abilities at the advanced level. Third, the ultimate key of the matter lies in what kind of literary writings should be chosen, and in how they should be prepared so as to function most effectively as pedagogical texts. The traditional “literary readers” are apparently insufficient in developing students’ functional ability. Through many concrete examples, this paper will demonstrate that proficiency-based approaches can be applied to the development and instruction of literary writings, in such ways that “advanced” students could be truly advanced to the level where they belong in terms of speaking and writing.