Prospective English language teachers' views on literature in their teacher education curriculum and its potential value

Foreign language teachers use literary texts in their classrooms for their potential practical uses among which the existence of their enriched lexis is the leading one. Still, much research is needed to map and develop literature teaching in foreign language classrooms in Turkey. In this study, views of prospective English language teachers on literature and its place in their teacher education curriculum are studied. Eighty-four second and third year prospective teachers of English participated in this study. A five point Likert-type scale including 24 questions was developed and the reliability of the scale was found to be .962, pointing at the scale's high internal reliability. The findings indicated that 78% of the prospective teachers have positive feelings about literature courses in their teacher education programs. In terms of the genres, although accepting the novel and short story as important genres, majority of them do not think that poetry is an important genre that can be used in EFL classrooms. Although most of the participants believe that literature courses help learning about the target culture while developing students' lexis, in terms of language skills, they do not fully agree that speaking can be developed by means of literature.