Teachers' Opinion Towards The Use Of Literature In Teaching English To Young Language Learners

Abstract

As the front-liner of the educational system, teachers are given very huge duty and responsibility to teach their students. There are so many ways of them in doing their duty. One of the possibilities is using literature in their language teaching. However, there are still some arguments within the concept of using literature in English language teaching. Many researchers, like McRae (1991), Hişmanoğlu (2005), Cremin, Mottram, Bearne and Goodwin (2008), argue that teachers were often lack of background, preparation and knowledge of literature in teaching. This study tried to find out what actually happened to the practice of using literature in teaching English in Indonesia, especially Salatiga and Semarang Regency. The research question of this study is “what are the teachers‟ views toward the use of literature in English teaching?” As a matter of fact, the advantages, problems and methodologies when they were dealing with literature were covered as well. The data were collected from classroom observations and interviews with the teachers that used literature in their English teaching. The result showed that all the teachers had positive views toward the use of literatures because it brought some advantages which were memorability and linguistic modeling benefits. Nonetheless, they also confessed that it was time consuming and difficult in selecting the kinds of literature. They prefered to use story and song as their favorite types of literature. Ultimately, they used discussion and simulation or role-play as their way of using literature in their teaching.