Advance Paper Spotlight: “The Advantages of Using Literature in the Language Learning Classes” by Ali Mohammed

Advance: a SAGE preprints community has hosted over 350 papers in the fields of humanities and social sciences since its launch in October 2018. Preprints are versions of scholarly papers that haven’t been peer-reviewed.

The paper we want to highlight today was first posted to Advance in November 2019. “The Advantages of Using Literature in the Language Learning Classes” by Ali Mohammed focuses on the significance of bringing literature of all types—including short stories, plays, poetry, and excerpts from novels—into language classes to help facilitate language learning for students.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Ali Mohammed about his research:

What motivated you to pursue this research?

For the last nine years, I have been teaching literary classes of (Novel and Drama) to the BA students of English language and literature in Cihan University, Sulaimani-Iraq. While doing so I have, many times, come across this question: “Are the literary classes more important and advantageous in learning the English language or the linguistic classes?” by the students, as some of them believe they attain more knowledge about the language in the literary classes. Therefore, I decided to conduct this research to come up with an appropriate answer for this question, if possible.

While conducting your research, were there any surprising findings?

The most shocking part of my paper was the fact that the huge majority of the students interviewed thought that even their linguistic knowledge was expanded through literature and the literary quotes they were given to analyze.

What is the most important or influential piece of scholarship you’ve read in the last year?

 I just recently read a PhD synopsis entitled, “From Novel to Film: Immigrant Experience in the Film Adaptations of the Selected Novels of the Diaspora” by Dayalbagh. It was really enlightening and offered many important insights about literary works in general and novels in particular.

You can read Ali Mohammad’s paper here, and discover more research posted to Advance here.

Acknowledgement

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