Formalist (Linguistic) criticism in an English language teacher education program: The reward approach

The place of literary criticism in the education of pre-service English language teachers in EFL contexts is rarely discussed in the related literature. Traditional view of teaching criticism involves learning of the tenets of the critical school and applying them to literary texts. In this paper, an application of teaching criticism is discussed with examples from classroom tasks and procedures. Constructed by the researcher, the ‘Reward’ approach stands for reading, elicitation, writing, articulating, representational study, and discussion. In ‘Reward’, a multidisciplinary approach to reading of a literary text was used by incorporating the study of various visual arts. In this paper, the approach is applied and the evaluation is completed through surveys and qualitative data of students’ (n=80) experiences to see how learning formalist criticism affected their literary reading processes, perception, and thinking. The results of this study suggest that the overall appreciation of the students with this approach is high and the students want to learn about literature courses through similar approaches in their future literature courses.