Discussion

The objectives of this study are to investigate the teachers’ views about the integration of
literary texts in the English language program, get information about the teachers’ views
about the advantages of using literary texts in the language classroom, find out what
difficulties the teachers face in using these literary texts and obtain information about the
types of literary texts these teachers prefer to use. Researchers uses questionnaire to
obtain the result to support the research objectives. The objective of the questionnaire
was to ascertain the rationale of teachers’ view on literary texts used in language
classroom. The questionnaire contains three sections with the first section consisting five-
points Likert scale questions ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree and always
to never, second section consisting 4 close-ended questions and last section consisting 2
open-ended questions to investigate teachers’ opinion on how to carry out their lessons.

The first question “Literature is a good language teaching resource for secondary
schools in Malaysia” is about the effectiveness of literature in language teaching.
1. Literature is a good language teaching resource for secondary schools in
Malaysia.
As illustrated in the chart, 10% answered strongly disagrees, 15%
answered neutral, 55% answered agree and 20% strongly agree that literature is a
good language teaching resource for secondary schools in Malaysia, which
explains the attitude of the educators towards the effectiveness of literature in
English language learning among secondary schools students. The positive
attitude towards English language teaching by using literature is shown.
Moving on to the second question “I encourage my students to read literary texts by
themselves in their free time”, is concerned with the frequency of encouragement given
by the respondents to students on reading literary texts.
2. I encourage my students to read literary texts by themselves in their free time.
As shown in the chart, 24% of the respondents answered always, 38%
answered very often, 33% answered sometimes and 5% of the respondents
answered rarely that they encourage their students to read literary texts by
themselves in their free time.
 The third question in the questionnaire stated “I encourage students to relate the
topics and themes of the literary text they read to their own personal experience, feelings
and opinions.” It concerns with the frequency of encouragement given by the educators
to the students to relate the literary text to their affective feelings.
3. I encourage students to relate the topics and themes of the literary text they read
to their own personal experience, feelings and opinions.
As depicted in the chart, 30% out of 20 respondents always encourage
students to relate their affective feelings to the literary texts. 50% of respondents
answered very often and 15% respondents answered sometimes. However, it was
found that 5% of respondents which is 1 out of the 20 respondents answered
rarely with the statement.
The next question which is “I pre-teach all new words of the literary texts I use”
looks at the way of respondents carry out in teaching literary texts. By asking this
opinion, the researchers can roughly see how usually educators carry their lesson before
they go in-depth in teaching.
4. I pre-teach all new words of the literary texts I use.
As a result, 20% of the respondents always pre-teach all new words of the
literary texts they use. 20% of the respondents answered very often, 50%
answered sometimes and only 10% respondents answered rarely. This shows that
educators depend on the text they use before they pre-teach the new words of the
literary texts.
Moving on to the next question which is question 5, “I provide enough guideline and
instructions to understand the literary texts introduced in class especially in classroom
activities.” It is concerned with how much information is given by the educators in
classroom activities.
5. I provide enough guideline and instructions to understand the literary texts
introduced in class especially in classroom activities.
As shown in the chart above, 90% of the respondents answered yes that
they provide enough guideline and instructions to understand the literary texts.
Only 10% respondents answered no. This shows that the importance of giving
 enough guideline and instructions to students in order to let them understand the
literary texts.
Question number 6 “Which of the following types of literary texts do you prefer to
use in language teaching?” deals with the genres used by the educators in language
teaching.
6. Which of the following types of literary texts do you prefer to use in language
teaching?
As can be seen from the graph, 20% of respondents prefer to use novels in
language teaching. Majority respondents would like to use short stories as
teaching materials which consists of 75% of them. However, there is 5% of
respondents prefer use poem in language teaching to any others literary texts.
Moving on to the next question, “Please list any criteria that you think are important
for selecting literary texts for use in language teaching.” is concerned with the criteria
that respondents will think of when they are selecting literary texts for use in language
teaching.
7. Please list any criteria that you think are important for selecting literary texts for
use in language teaching.
As shown in the chart, 60% of the respondents answered interesting as the
most important criteria for selecting literary texts in language teaching. Only 5%
of respondents answered short while 30% of respondents answered linguistically
appropriate and 5% of respondents answered texts. This shows that educators
concern how interesting is the literary text for use in language teaching so that
students will want to learn in the lesson.

There are two open ended questions included in the questionnaire which are
question 8 and question 9. Question 8 stated “I like to split the classroom activities into
phases like: pre-reading, while reading and post reading activity. Why?” It aimed to
know how the educators would like to carry out their lesson plan and the reasons.
Majority of the respondents like to split the lesson into pre-reading, while-reading and
post-reading. The reasons that they have given are to ensure the flow of teaching lesson.
Some of them give the reason that to ensure the objectives of the lesson are achieved
through organised lesson plan.
However, there are some respondents do not like to split their lesson into phases
because they use their own teaching style to teach the students. Some of them think that
lesson will go spontaneously so they could not follow step by step in teaching.
In the last question of the questionnaire, the researcher posted a question “I
encourage students to enjoy the stories as a whole, and not to focus on details.” to
investigate the preference of the respondents in what domain they would like to
encourage students to read the story. As a result, majority of the respondents state that
they prefer students enjoy the stories as a whole but not focus on the details. The reason
given is that students can only truly understand the stories by reading stories as a whole.
Some of them think that students are motived to learn if they are encouraged to read the
stories as a whole.
However, there are some respondents prefer students focus on the details rather
that enjoy stories as a whole. The reasons given are sometimes students need to pick the
related details. Some of them think that details are important to enable students in order
to understand the whole story.
Moving on to the last question which is question 10, “You prefer activities that
emphasize on.”
10. You prefer activities that emphasize on
As the graph shown 70% of respondents prefer discussion about the literary texts
while 25% of respondents prefer reading comprehension questions in language teaching.
Only 5% of the respondents give other activities that they prefer.