Literature circles and Secondary Education in Spain: a proposal for intervention

Abstract

The use of literature as a teaching resource in EFL classes is not very popular – at least when we talk about English lessons in Secondary Education in Spain (Medina Calzada, 2013). However, teaching English through literature is a topic that has been widely studied and that has been proved to be effective (Brumfit and Carter, 1986; Little and Wood, 2005; Alam 2002 in Ali & Ahmed, 2015). In this paper we want to support this idea and demonstrate that literature not only can be a perfectly adequate resource for teaching a foreign language, but that in fact it can be more beneficial than teaching from a merely linguistic approach. How can we demonstrate this? By revising a strong theoretical framework and using it to design a proposal for intervention that includes literature in a specific context – a context provided by the Spanish secondary education system.