I think that literature could be very helpful to students' learning. We conducted a relevant study [Gkouni, V., Paparoussi, M., & Andreou, E. (2011). The efficacy of teaching differentiation on children with Special Educational Needs through Literature. Procedia – Social and Behavioural Sciences, 29, 67-74.] The purpose of our study was to support six primary school children with Special Educational Needs (SEN)- out of a sample of 16 pupils with and without SEN- in order to improve their writing skills by using the method of differentiated teaching through Children’s literature. The intervention lasted 6 teaching hours during which all children edited a variety of creative activities based on two chosen literature texts, with the writing tasks being differentiated for children with SEN. The collected data proved that most children with SEN increased the text size they produced but they presented variations regarding the quality of the vocabulary they used.

Thank you Eleni- sounds like a very relevant study- nice specific measures to evaluate too which is something we need to think about.

I use literature has a few years in the faculty classroom in the introdutory disciplines of psychology.

My experience indicate some benefits of this use, like improve learning, think about the theory in others contexts and break the monotony of scientific readings.

Normally I use this novels:

Walden II - B. F. Skinner (behaviorism);

When Nietzsche Wept - I. D. Yalow (psychoanalysis).

Hi Emma,

The scope of Literature extends beyond lessons, and on to life. Some of the ways in which it could benefit students are:

1) Better understanding of Perspective, Interpretations, Symbolism, Motifs and Patterns, Psychological Intricacies

2) Sharpens Critical Thinking skills (reading between the lines, critiquing, analysis, synthesis, evaluation)

3) Can work in DRTA activities in the ESL classroom (hypothesis formulation, predictive reading)

4) Enhances language skills (better understanding of stylistics, rhetoric and prosody)

5) Facilitates interconnections between fields such as History, Sociology, Philosophy, Psychology, the Liberal Arts etc (and could enliven their relevance through anecdotal narratives)

6) Enhances life skills and habits of mind (empathy, heightened sensibilities, adaptability, open-mindedness, global and multicultural awareness)

Some texts to consider:

Metamorphosis~ Kafka

Grapes of Wrath~ Steinbeck

1984~ George Orwell

Brave New World~ Huxley

To the Lighthouse~ Virginia Woolf

Lord of the Flies~ William Golding

Farenheit 451~ Ray Bradbury

Kafka on the Shore~ Haruki Murakami

Wuthering Heights~ Emily Bronte

Sometimes shorter pieces can be a much better and less intimidating place to start at. For instance, before treading into the deeper psychoanalysis of James Joyce's Ulysses, it might help to initiate interest in his shorter pieces like Araby or A Little Cloud. In the interest of time, it may even suffice to work with short literary texts that can get students thinking. Literature is contagious. Those that take to it, will do so naturally without any further prodding by the teacher. Those that don't can still survive shorter, crisper texts, and who knows, how these may even change the way they look at life.

Yes, Emma, I think that literature can help.

I conducted a study with Poetry and Physics (but in Portuguese) showing some possibilities. I also have a physics textbooks with many examples, contextualizations and relationships with literature. For example, to speak about Electricity, Frankenstein is a great theme, the book was written in the exact moment of the electrical efevervescence. The science and its effects were questioned both in scientific discussions and in philosophy behing the Frankenstein's book.

Absolutely. Within philosophy we teach abstract concepts and moral maxims that need to be fleshed out to really feel the impact of the abstract concept. For instance, Melville's book, Billy Bud, helps with understanding Kant's categorical imperative and the ambiguous nature that is morality. To teach them the abstract concept is one thing. But to cultivate it by introducing art is to bring these tough concepts into an aesthetic realm that can play on the harp strings of our souls and actually move people gently towards feeling what is right, which will result in doing what is right.

One more example is with ontology, the study of being. When teaching the physicalist tradition, Lucretius' "The Nature of Things" helps to nurture students to become ever more moved by beautiful words. Beauty has a lasting imprint on the perceiver. It should be all the power we wield to motivate people to discovering new ideas.

A German romantic, F. Schiller, stated that it was one thing to know an abstract moral principle, but it was another to be able to move students into feeling them, and to actually act upon them. The mind's ability to decide whether it should act on a moral principle is very complex. The emotional brain is connected to decision making. Therefore, to truly teach someone these moral maxims we shouldn't neglect the emotional side of the mind, but cultivate it.

Sense Publishers has a book series called Social Fictions that features novels, plays, and even poetry that is based on social research. It is an alternate way of disseminating research findings, meant to be accessible for students who are learning research concepts as well as others who are not familiar with research jargon. I have read a couple of them, and they're pretty interesting. If you teach classes in sociology, psychology, communication, or even philosophy they might be a good fit. (You can find more here: https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/social-fictions-series/)

I'd imagine other types of research could be disseminated in literary form as well. I know Sandra Faulkner has written books about disseminating research as poetry, and Laura Ellingson has many works that examine how research can be shared in ways other than traditional manuscripts. I'm sure students would appreciate the fruits of those labors, too.

Thank you all so much- these suggestions are very helpful, I suppose the other issue is how to build the literature into the assessments so that students really do engage and appreciate the value of the reading- a short book review perhaps for evidence of reading but separate from other factual assessments? I suppose this touches upon the issue that many of these skills are the unseen but valuable skills that students should pick up through the course of their studies but due to google and wikipedia rarely are....this is another pn reason for the project- a way of using literature to ensure students engage with continuous text...

Yes, Eamma, yes.

Young students should be advised to read novels such as Dr. Zhivago. Such novels can shape the philosophy of life of the young ones.

Do you think literature (novels) could be used to help students learn?

YES, DEFINITELY

The Problem is that the taste for literature, the joy of reading CANNOT be taught, nor can it be enforced!

Students must discover it themselves (of course you can motivate them) to work efficiently. Similarly, even the books approach the Topics and subjects (as already stated previously), I would argue that the same books do not necessarily work for different students. Also here, students as individuals shall find their way.

I am of the firm opinion that narrative texts have a beneficial effect on comprehension and writing (but I would extend this to poetry and Theater, even why not to comics).

Explore different "universes", mentally place yourself in a different Point of view, suffer dilemmas between yourself and the ego of the main character of the book being read.

I am not a teacher or a Professor, and sorry if I talk nosense, but I can figure out many different positive mechanisms (and few if any at all negative ones) on how literature may help.

By "overlap", you want to be like the main character and his/her Problems are yours (and you think of his/her potential Solutions/escapes before they are disclosed), e.g. Moby Dick (and you may decide your self to be Moby Dick, Ahab, Tweegy...)

By "opposition", you "hate" the character and by all means would avoid his/her Problems (and you think of the potential consequences before they are disclosed) e.g. Jurney to the end of the night

Among very many other thousand of books, I would universally recommend (and likely your pupils will find are least one in the list interesting):

One Thousand and One Nights

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes 1605 (both parts)

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Blindness by José Saramago

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

In geography the novel will help students learn about the life of people, the culture, social economic  and political environment where this novel is based. The land forms,  the vegetation, infrastructure of the place and the general learning of the student in areas of location of places, geographic concepts, vocabulary etc

Dear Emma,

It is taken for granted that literature is an indispensable part of learning and teaching  a foreign language , it encompasses cultural rites, rituals, expressions and idiosyncrcies. I can't imagine a satisfactory language proficiency without studying literary texts. Unfortunately , literature and more specifically novels have been victimized and denigrated by ELT teachers the aftermath of which has been nothing but a diluted shallow English proficiency  hopeless in intellectually pragmatically demanding  communications. Some areas of language proficiency  such as pragmatic considerations of  presuppositions, entailment, inferences , etc   can not be properly  learned and taught outside the context of literature. Metaphoric formulaic expressions such as metaphors and idioms can hardly be learned in decontexualized non-literary fashion since the linguistic structures and vocabularies can be simply  misleading and prone to misunderstanding. What's more , the secondary, connotative, non-core associative meanings of vocabulary items  can rarely ever be taught without utilizing literary texts . Efforts must be made to create the necessary link between literature and ELT.

Also, here's a relevant publication:

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2300652

Thank you very much Rahimi, it is interesting that another lecturer who teaches English as a foreign language highlighted how important literature was at a conference we presented at, I had never made this link but it adds further weight to the argument that actually these complex texts are far more useful at the early stages of learning than is commonly perceived. Thank you also for the paper link, all the best Emma

yes Emma,  authenticity as an important feature of appropriate communicative materials can be  guaranteed through utilization of literary texts , or else, students are exposed to ''pedagogical''   diluted fragmented simplified texts which are by no means culturally rich , nor are they ever authentic and natural .  Learners  gain knowledge '' about '' language '' or  ''usage'' rather the the language itself and its real ''Use'' in genuine socially culturally oriented situation. The dexontextualization of language through exclusion of literary materials for language teaching have led to churning out students with high level of theoretical pedagogical information and scanty cultural understanding rendering them helpless in  real  communication. Denigration of literature and high levels of refined graceful  art has caused a sort of anti  intellectualism, shallowness, and bias  reflective of a philistinism pandemic in our educational settings.

Dear Emma, I agree with the idea that some novels (and not only novels) are very useful in teaching process. I’ve noticed that many students like to read the translations of their native authors (I teach the Russian language as L3 or even L4 in N.C.C.U., Taiwan), so the Russian translations of the Chinese or English poetry or prose always provoke the student’s great interest. The same situation is with the well-known non-Russian cartoons, movies, mangas, songs, etc. with the Russian subtitles. Surely, the translation should be good and professional. And very often it is easier for students to start the conversational exercises after the reading of such well translated texts than after the more difficult original Russian texts (the choice of a text depends on a student language level). I think “the original Russianness” (or smth else, if we teach an other language) sometimes isn’t very important if we work with a good translation. I give a task for my students to translate their favorite short story, manga, fairy tale, etc. and to retell it in Russian. we study "Russianness" later, when the are able to participate in the conversations. I've noticed also, when my students insert the Chinese exotisms (from the Russian point of view) in their own Russian discourse (L3 or L4), they understand better the logic of the Russian grammar. Of course, those students who visit "The Russian literature" class read the original texts. But for the conversational courses the origin of texts isn't so important, imho.    

Thanks Olga, that is very interesting- our original research suggested that the narrative style of text seems to help students advance their native language grammar skills also.

I guess depth of understanding is difficult to measure but we could look at grammatical errors as way of evaluating the usefulness of novels...universal student issues :)

Emma, I think, your remarkable note confirms the general trend. Usually it is easier for students whose L1 has a rich grammar (e.g. tenses, aspects, cases, genders, a complex system of the parts of speech, etc) to study another rich grammar, or, conversely, the study of L2 grammar helps to understand the specifics of their native L1 grammar. Sometimes the sucsess depends on the knowledge of a school grammar program. Many years ago it was interesting for me to find out that the school programs in some states havn’t a subject "The Grammar of Our Native Language" (or anything like that). For example, many Taiwanese students (the 1styear) don’t know the syntactic categories of subject, predicate, etc. because the school courses of their native Chinese language aim to study characters or read the Chinese texts (sometimes – to learn the very ancient texts). Nor the structural analysis of the written or oral speech facts neither learning linguistic terms. As for their English language as L2, it is often taught with the communicative methods (ie, syntactic or morphological categories are not delaminated in detail). How to measure the depth of a novel's understanding ... Surely, the students' cross-cultural misunderstandings become clear for a teacher when his/her students write an essay or discuss the endless "Do you think ..." ("Why did a hero…?", "What will these heroes do in their future? "," Is this situation possible here, or it is relevant only for Russia / Japan / USA, etc? "). Yes, you're right, it is easier to measure (scale?) the grammatical criterion in estimating a fiction text usefulness.