Fostering First Year English Majors’ Reading Proficiency Through A Genre-based Teaching Of Dahl’s Short Fiction

Résumé: Reading comprehension is an important yet complex skill, the development of which should be assigned central importance in the English as a foreign language (EFL) university curriculum. Engaging with literary texts has been proposed as an effective strategy for developing students’ reading proficiency. The present paper seeks to foster EFL first-year students’ reading proficiency through a genre-based teaching of the stylistic features of the short fiction of the British author of popular children’s literature and short stories Roald Dahl. It is hypothesized that a focus on the recurrent stylistic features in the works of a single author can effectively enhance the target audience’s ability to notice and internalize these elements leading to improved reading proficiency. To achieve this aim, the paper proposes a reading comprehension teaching unit designed following the principles of the Sydney school’s approach to genre (Systemic Functional Linguistics) as an efficient and effective tool for enhancing the learning of the stylistic features in question.

Publié dans la revue: آفاق علمية