How Literature Sharpen Our Mind

“Literature is a question minus the answer” -Roland Barthes

During the learning process, it is essential for teachers to provide meaningful content that will provoke students’ interest, and give something that important to talk, so students could get involved emotionally and creatively in the classroom. Implementing learning language through literature would be an appropriate decision for both the teacher and students. Although, literature sometimes becomes complex and quite hard to understand, learning language through literature could give more several advantages for the learners.

For new language learners, read or listen to some kinds of literature will be quite challenging, because “Literature is a question minus the answer” (Roland Barthes in Lazar, 1993, p.2). As a statement of Jonathan D. Picken (2007) in his book Literature, Metaphor, and The Foreign Language, literary writing necessitates readers to give more attention to the language than they need to do for most other writing. Since some of literature have tricky language, it can cause the students to feel challenged, and they will engage more often with literary text. The expertise obtained while studying literary texts will help students become better, make the readers more aware of the world they live in (McRae, 1991 in Daskalovska and Dimova, 2012).

One of the most intriguing pieces of literature to talk about is poetry. Poetry somehow has a different degree of ambiguities, paradoxes, and ironies than other literary forms. The ‘dominant’ feature of poetry is that it draws the reader’s attention to the language it uses, the forms (hence ‘formalism’), (Hall, 2015, p.14). The language of poetry contradicts the referential language of science or of logic. In this view, a poem represents a unique experience, and it can’t be translated or generalized into other terms (Brooks in Hall, 2015, p.12)

Learning through literature or poetry, unconsciously, will influence the way students think and learning language. With its complexity and uniqueness poem could sharpen student’s mind.

Along the way of my life, I always try to learn many things from a variety of sources like books, experiences, from others, and failure, even. The most interesting is to learn from literature. Not all the things I could learn easily, though. For instance, in learning other languages, in this case, English, I found difficulties somehow. Especially when learning language through poems.

The part that exciting and challenging at once is when poetry playing with its words. I need to spin my head in finding their perfect meaning. Somehow its words are simple, but actually, the whole poem could have a complex interpretation. Both reading and writing poetry helps me to express my emotion, feeling, and thought. Read poems ignite my motivation to learn more and more, until someday I will able to understand a complicated poem.

Learning through poetry authorizes me to experience a rich language environment. The more I jog with literature the more I recognize a variety of patterns of language. I often can find unusual connections between things, a new parable of two or more things. Poetry unconsciously influenced the way I develop my creative expression. I feel freer to say my ideas and feeling, after reading some poems.

There are many different ways of learning language, but learning through literature especially poems is one of the best. It really helps me to improve my English skills, critical thinking ability, and even the way I express my feelings.

Sources:

Daskalovska, Nina and Dimova, Violeta. (2012). Why should literature be used in the language classroom? Procedia — Social and Behavioral Sciences. 46, 1182–1186.

Hall, Geof. (2005). Literature in Language Education. Palgrave Macmillan.

Lazar, Gillian. (1993). Literature and Language Teaching: A guide for teachers and trainers. Cambridge University Press.

Picken, Jonathan D. (2007). Literature, Metaphor, and The Foreign Language. Palgrave Macmillan.