Literature as an act of Engagement and Participation: Encouraging Autonomy in the Classroom

Abstract

This study reports on the effect of literary texts on learner autonomy. The study was conducted on a group of senior students majoring in TEFL at university. To this end, it purported to investigate students’ views of their responsibilities and decision-making abilities, as two major phenomena in the learner’s autonomy, in learning English. Further, their motivation level and the actual language learning activities they undertook inside and outside classroom with a view to gauging their readiness for autonomous learning were also measured. Sixty participants with similar knowledge in English were selected through a proficiency test to make sure the groups were nearly homogeneous. These subjects formed our experimental and control groups. Then, the experimental group was given some literary texts (short stories) to read and analyze the elements of the story during one academic semester. In order to assess all the subjects’ opinions about autonomous learning especially in second language learning, a questionnaire was used to collect the relevant data at the end of the semester. The results indicated that the lite4rary texts could boost the experimental subjects’ motivation abut could not achieve autonomous behavior at a satisfactory level in second language learning.