Literature and Language Teaching a Course Book

The use of literature for language teaching purposes has always been a controversial issue in different contexts all around the world. People still discuss whether it is a good idea to include literary works in the course material list of language classrooms because even though literary works enable learners to see authentic samples of the target language, give them a chance to understand the culture of the target language in different aspects, the complexity of the language presented to readers and the length of books make it difficult for teachers to use them with learners of different levels. With the new curriculum suggested by Turkish Higher Education Council (YÖK), 2 new courses were added to the courses were added to the course lists of English Language Teaching Departments in Faculties of Education in Turkey. These courses are "Literature and Language Teaching I-II", These courses aim to train prospective teachers of English with a good command of not only theoretical information about different literary forms such as short stories and novels, but also ideas related to their practice in the language classroom. After so many discussions with colleagues from different universities in Turkey, we agreed that we needed a course material that would facilitate the jobs of teachers teaching this course and that would give students a chance to go further than a simple analysis of literary works.