Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies Teaching English Language and Literature for Secondary Schools Hana Tichá Cat in the Rain: The suitability of an authentic literary work for the intermediate English classroom Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: James Edward Thomas, M.A. 2013 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, James Thomas, for his guidance and support during my research. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: TEXTS IN THE CLASSROOM 4 Invented texts 5 CHAPTER TWO: AUTHENTICITY OF CLASSROOM TEXTS 8 The benefits of studying authentic texts 12 Authenticity and content 12 Authenticity and ideology 16 Authenticity and motivation 17 CHAPTER THREE: LITERATURE IN ELT 19 Challenges of literary text 19 Benefits of using literary texts 22 CHAPTER FOUR: READING AND DERIVING MEANING FROM TEXT 25 CHAPTER FIVE: CAT IN THE RAIN – ANALYSIS AND IMPLICATIONS 31 Top-down perspective 31 Meaning and schemata 32 Text structure and organization 41 Density of information 42 Text Cohesion 43 Bottom-up perspective 49 Sentence length 50 Syntactic complexity 50 Grammar 55 Vocabulary 68 CONCLUSION 93 REFERENCES 95 RESUMÉ 104 SUMMARY 105 Introduction Cat in the Rain is a very short story by Ernest Hemingway (an American author, journalist and the 1954 Nobel Prize winner in literature), which was first published in 1925 as a part of the short story collection In Our Time. Hemingway became famous within his own life time (1899–1961), particularly being known for his simple style of writing and careful structuring; thus like most of his novels, his short stories are very easy to read. Cat in the Rain is an apparently simple story about an American couple spending a holiday in Italy, however, as Taylor (1981) puts it, “behind the very realistic surface there is a wealth of symbolism and possible meanings for the readers to supply for themselves” (p. 62). In the pages that follow it will be argued that this simplicity of style generating multiple interpretations in the mind of the reader is what makes Cat in the Rain particularly suitable for the EFL classroom. The thesis focuses attention on the intermediate level of proficiency of English learners; it attempts to defend the view that Cat in the Rain is a text with lexical and structural difficulty that will challenge intermediate students without overwhelming them, and that it is an effective vehicle for the achievement of certain language and content goals at this level of proficiency. In order to support the hypothesis that Cat in the Rain is suitable for an intermediate student of English, the text is discussed from different points of view. The thesis touches upon linguistic, as well as methodological issues, and the overall approach applied is a whole-to-part orientation; it begins with the text as a meaningful whole and then tries to understand the various features that enable the text to function. Chapter One begins by laying out the theoretical background concerning texts and their role in the classroom. Chapter Two deals with the complex issue of authenticity of 1 classroom texts. Chapter Three describes the benefits and challenges of literary tests in ELT. The aim of Chapter Four is to outline some of the processes that take place during reading, as well as the ways of getting meaning from texts. Chapter Five analyses the readability of Cat in the Rain – both from the bottom-up and top-down perspectives – and looks at possible ways of exploiting the text in the intermediate English classroom. Before any discussion can begin, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by the intermediate level of proficiency. Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (Sinclair, 1987) writes that “intermediate is used to refer to students and their level of work in a subject when they are not beginners, but are not yet advanced” (p. 762). This is a rather broad definition, but according to Brown (2007), the intermediate level of proficiency of L2 learners is indeed richly diverse. He argues that at this stage some automatic processing takes place; phrases, structures, and conversational rules have long been practised and are increasing in number, enabling the mental processes to “automatize” (p.124). Brown believes that students benefit from small doses of short, simple explanations of points in English; grammar topics such as progressive verb tenses and clauses typify intermediate level teaching. Increasing complexity in terms of length, grammar, and discourse characterize reading materials; students read paragraphs and short, simple stories (p. 127). To put this concept in the context of the Czech education system, secondary students are supposed to graduate at so called threshold or intermediate level of proficiency (the B1 level). The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) describes what knowledge and skills Czech learners have to develop in order to communicate and interact effectively. The CEFR includes a set of Common Reference Levels dividing learners into three broad divisions (A, B, C), which can be further divided into six levels. B1 stands for an independent user of the language who 2 can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters related to work, school, leisure, etc. can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an area where the language is spoken. can produce simple connected texts on topics that are familiar or of personal interest. can describe experiences, events, dreams, hopes and ambitions, and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans (Council of Europe, 2011, p. 24). 3 Chapter One: Texts in the classroom Thornbury (2005) argues that language learning should both begin and end in texts (p. 162). But what is meant by a text? In layman‟s terms, it can be anything printed on a page – a list of isolated words, a couple of sentences, or an excerpt from a book. However, Thornbury defines a text as a self-contained, well-formed, cohesive and coherent language event which has a clear communicative purpose, which is appropriate to the context of use, and is a recognizable text type (p. 19). Cat in the Rain (hereafter CITR) meets all the above mentioned criteria: It is a complete and independent unit with its beginning, middle and end. It is constructed in accordance with the syntactic rules of English. The parts of the text stick together and make sense. The text was written to communicate the author‟s message to the reader. The language was selected appropriately for the situation it describes. It can be recognized as a combination of the descriptive and narrative text types. Thornbury (2005) identifies three reasons for including texts in textbooks: a linguistic purpose (providing contextualized examples of grammar structures, vocabulary, pragmatic functions, or as a model for text production), a skills development purpose (material for development of reading and listening skills), and a third purpose, which he calls „text-as-stimulus‟ – the text is used to introduce into the classroom content to which learners can respond (p. 113). However, from my own experience in EFL teaching, full texts are generally neglected in the classroom (even though one of the expected outcomes of Czech secondary education is that students will be able to produce cohesive and coherent texts 4 in English). The following pages will look at the most common type of texts used in the classroom – invented texts – which will be later juxtaposed with authentic texts. Invented texts According to the above mentioned definition (Thornbury, 2005), a text is a language event which has a clear communicative purpose. Based on my observations, this communicative potential of texts was rarely exploited in the activities of the traditional language classroom. Students frequently read a text for the sole purpose of answering questions about it – answers that the teacher already knew. Such activities communicated the students‟ mastering of the language of the text, not its content. Nowadays it is generally agreed that concentrating on the language as a system to be learned is too narrow (Lewis & Hill, 1992, p. 23). Furthermore, especially since the advent of corpus linguistics, artificial classroom texts have been subject to extensive criticism. It is felt that invented texts provide poor models of real language use, and they are concerned with forms of the language rather than with more communicative features of a text, e.g. vocabulary and discourse features. Such texts are not used to inform the reader about the world; they are used to present language features (Thornbury, 2005, p.104). Widdowson (1978) argues that when those texts appear in structurally graded courses, they seem primarily to be used to consolidate a knowledge of structure and vocabulary that has already been introduced and to extend this knowledge by incorporating into the passages examples of elements of usage that come next in the course. In this case, the passage is intended to present selected parts of the language system, and in consequence it frequently exhibits an abnormally high occurrence of 5 particular structures. The effectiveness of passages of this kind is achieved at the expense of a normal realization of the system as use. According to Widdowson, “Even when there is an attempt to introduce features to lend a verisimilitude of normality these features do not merge into the passage in a natural way but only serve to accentuate its abnormality” (p. 78). Moreover, Widdowson (1978) argues that the process of simplifying vocabulary and syntax of classroom texts might actually result in a distortion of the message (p. 88). A criticism is often made of simplified texts that the simplification of vocabulary results in more difficult grammar.