Reading Literature Cross Culturally

Education is the main element in developing whole human being. It is known that, education is a mindful and planned effort to actualize learning situation and learning process in order the students can develop their potential actively until they can be able to become the heir and the nation’s developer. Without education, it is difficult for the human being to reach their ambition, to improve their skill, and to keep their religion strength. Therefore, the management of education must be oriented in how to achieve the better change to obtain some goals that have been dreamed.

One of the important items that affects to develop the students’ potential in learning process is the tecaher’s creativity in creating material that suitable with the topic of the lesson. The teacher must consider what medium that correspond with the students need in improving their ability in learning English as foreign language. A medium that the teacher can use in the class is Literature. There are many kinds of literature that can be taken to support the learning process such as poems, short stories, plays, song etc. The teacher can choose one of them that interesting and attractive for the students by considering the students’ condition. If there is chance, the teacher also can create a literary text that can be taught in the class. It is depend on the teacher creativity.

However, it is known that, the content of literary text not only talk about Indonesian’s culture, but also it also talks about the other country culture. In any teaching situation, there are obviously some literary texts which are likely to present fewer cultural problems for students than others. For example, a text in English by a writer of a similar cultural background to the group of students studying the text may be more culturally accessible than a text written by an author from a culture far removed from the students' own. On the other hand, a text from another culture which deals with themes relevant to the students' own society may prove to be both accessible and absorbing. In other words, the selection of suitable texts can be quite complicated. And as there are many countries in the world where teachers have little say in the choice of texts, we may sometimes find ourselves using texts which are remote from our students' own experience. In addition, although students may find it easier to respond personally to a text from within their own culture, there is a strong argument for saying that exposing students to literature from other cultures is an enriching and exciting way of increasing their awareness of different values, beliefs, social structures and so on (Lazar: 2009).

Based on the argument above, whatever the reasons, then, for using a text which students find culturally difficult, from the perspective of the teacher there are practical difficulties. In this paper, we aim to identify what some of these problems might be so that we can suggest a few ways of overcoming them. For complete paper you can download here

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