Literature for Developing Student's Humanity Awareness

Abstract

This paper proposes ELT classroom activity aims at developing student's humanity awareness as the path of cultivating their cultural literacy. Cultural literacy is central to student's learning journey as learning is not only about being competent in language, but also about using the competence to take part in social transformation. The design of the activity integrates language activities and the efforts to develop student's humanity awareness by using literary texts in order to serve this purpose. Literary texts are chosen for its possible strength and contributions for the purpose of developing student's humanity awareness. Using literary texts to develop students's humanity awareness might simply be understood as providing students with humanity empirical situations in the form of poems, songs, short stories, fictions, plays to be critically explored and judged before a set of humanity values and norms. It is expected that a new perspective and consciousness about how they should perform in their personal and societal roles would be gradually instilled at the end of the activity.