LITERATURE IN PFL

Despite the dominant tendency to remove literature from education, both in the scientific and the humanistic fields, many studies suggest ideas to continue using literary texts in the classroom, especially in first and second language teaching. The emergence of the intercultural approach in the last decades has been crucial in the attempt to recover the literary text as an innovative strategy that allows making the language classes into an open window to the world and, especially, to a specific culture. Based on that intercultural perspective, in the present work, we will review the arguments for the defence of literature in the language classroom. Thereby we can substantiate and contextualize our strategy of teaching Portuguese as a Foreign Language through literature, in order to promote students learn and recognise linguistic and cultural patterns. We believe this is the way to make PFL students conscious of the existence of topics that remain in the Portuguese linguistic and cultural imagination, and thus make them better speakers and mediators between their origin culture and Portuguese culture.