Exploring literature in English teaching:

Abstract

With a purpose of investigating if a book club creates spaces for students to experience personal involvement through the fruition of art, this paper discusses the book club experience of the novel “Wonder” in a group of 18 upper-intermediate English students. The data were collected through 6 personal responses from each student; then, a quantitative analysis of the Halliday’s types of processes (2004) and a qualitative categorization concluded that they have shown personal involvement with the novel through their lexicon-grammatical choices. As an outcome, in 71% of the answers, students expressed themselves by verbal and mental cognitive functions, sharing personal beliefs and point of views that they had while interacting with the novel. Such answers exposed how relationships with the social-cultural background of the student leads to personal involvement with a literary text. It makes possible to conclude that once learning a language through reading, literature becomes a key point to activate the process of fruition of art and lead to a meaningful and unique process.