Abstract:

Cognitive sciences have shed light on many of the deeper mysteries of the human brain. There are numerous questions that arise in the literary field that are now being answered – is there an innate sense of “literariness” in the brain? How is reading a newspaper article different from reading a novel? Literary theorists now have access to cognitive tools that were not previously available in the development of literary theories. These tools have, in fact, shown that when a text is believed to be fictional, it activates more parts of the reader’s brain than reading nonfictional text – even if the text itself is actually the same for both readers. It has been said that linguistic theory and literary theory are inextricably intertwined. This makes sense: how is one to understand the beauty of rhyme or accordance of syllables without a phonological understanding of the language? From a Second Language Acquisition (SLA) point of view, countless studies have been performed to isolate the most efficient manner of reading in a foreign language in order to acquire vocabulary and facilitate reading comprehension. Particularly, works in schema-theory and pre-reading tasks have been highly regarded, as they involve integrated top-down and bottom-up cognition. The issue arises, however, that there is quite a divide between certain instructors regarding their formal training in preparation for the teaching of foreign language literature. In many universities across the United States, for example, graduate programs in foreign languages tend to separate linguistic/pedagogy tracks and literature tracks – and have been doing so since the year 1967. The formation that a future professor of literature receives rarely involves pedagogical theory, and if it does, linguistics models are typically excluded; linguists in academia receive similarly minimal training in literary theory. I argue for a human cognition approach to the teaching of foreign language literature with the hopes that current and upcoming professionals will help cross this ever-expanding divide.

Keywords:

Human cognition, literary theory, pedagogy, foreign language, second language acquisition.