Improving student understanding of a foreign language culture is anything but a peripheral issue in the teaching of a foreign language. This pilot study reports on a second year required English course in a university in Japan that took a Literature Circles approach, where students were asked to read short stories out of class and then discuss these stories in class. Although students reported that they did not gain any special insights into the target language culture presented, they did report that reading fiction as source material for classroom activity helps with the acquisition of a vocabulary set that is more closely associated with lifestyle and culture. The results suggest that further study is warranted. Procedures of this pilot study are described and interpreted in the context of the English education system in Japan.
Literature circles (LC), an activity framework for classroom discussion, has been adapted for EFL classes to help students engage more deeply with reading texts. In this approach, students read texts outside of class, and discuss the texts in class, using a specified discussion framework. Originally developed for L1 classes as a tool for teaching literature, LC has been adapted for EFL classes, not only to help develop reading skills, but also to help students develop their discussion skills. However, to date, many adaptations of LC have relied on graded fiction as source material, which is not always appropriate for tertiary education. Feeling pressure to match course content with the labour market needs of our contemporary global society, English departments are increasingly being asked to include more academic content in their classes. This requires that non-fiction be used as source material. This preliminary study examines student perceptions of an LC class using non-fiction as source material. The subjects of this short, qualitative, pilot study were engineering students at a university in Japan. Procedures of the class and the issues that emerged are discussed.
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