The Impact of Literature Teaching Techniques on the Learners' Performance on Academic Reading Course Tests

Literature and its genres have always been impressive in the process of teaching and learning alongside the natural function of literature and literary research. Although second or foreign language teaching has received great attention by applied linguists, recently there has been a growing concern for the development of literature teaching methods too. This paper basing its approach on posttest only control group design has dealt with the introduction of Carter and Long's (1991) literature teaching approaches in a teacher training college in Iran to one hundred to-be-teacher students, aged between 18-24, divided into four experimental groups, to examine the effectiveness of these literature teaching approaches on the students' performance on academic reading course test. The statistical analysis of the results revealed that the performance of the three experimental groups was significantly higher than the control group. The results further revealed that the performance of Personal Growth Model was significantly higher than the other two models. The difference between the performance of the Culture Model group with that of the Language Model was not that much significant. The incorporation of literature teaching approaches in the skill-based academic courses is highly suggested. Among the many approaches and models developed, the Personal Growth Model by Carter and Long (1991) which proved to be working well with the academic students and their performance on reading skill course and may work well with other language skills too is suggested for the deployment in the process of teaching elsewhere and with other learners.