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Introduction
Literature has been the topic of a state-of-the-art paper in Language Teaching twice before, though the angle taken in each case was different. Bernard Lott's survey, entitled Language and literature (Lott 1988), was concerned mainly with examining literary language and the way linguistic thought was influencing (or not) literary criticism. There was a short section on teaching materials, divided between materials for mother-tongue readers and materials for second language (L2) learners. Lott makes the point that in the latter type of material, the approach is normally through the topic, 'teaching becomes group guidance', and goes on to claim that 'the text itself . . . is generally treated in a rather perfunctory way, and its distinctive nature as literature, and as a display of language put to special uses, seems often to be lost sight of' (Lott 1988: 9). In the section 'The way ahead', Lott discusses research as well - but in his case the search is on for an 'extended, practical methodology for investigating language as it is used in literature' and the research is 'aimed at producing an operational model for the analysis of style' (ibid.). In contrast, Gilroy & Parkinson's (1996) survey was entitled Teaching literature in a foreign language. It looked at developments in literary theory, reader response, and communicative language teaching, and then went on to examine materials for learners and teachers, focusing mainly on books (both specialist collections and general coursebooks) and to a large extent excluding articles.
Both papers were - as state-of-the-art papers should be - very much of their period, reflecting the concerns of linguists and teachers at the time. But a number of points are noteworthy, and interestingly these are points concerning division and exclusion. The first important point is that neither paper looks at empirical research into literature in language teaching. It is true that there was far less research then than there is now (see also Carter 2007), but whatever research there was then was not always accorded a place. Secondly, both papers focus very much on English, with only a few references to other languages, reflecting the predominance of English as the main global foreign language, and the division between it and other foreign languages. Having said that,...