Literature and Language Awareness: Using Literature to Achieve CEFR Outcomes

This article sets out to explore why literature (used in this article to mean poetry, plays, short stories or novels) is often a marginalised resource in EFL classrooms, even though the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR) suggests it should have a role in the classroom. It first reports on the results of a questionnaire investigating English teachers’ attitudes towards using literature in the classroom. After a discussion of these results, it explores some ways in which the use of literature can be linked to CEFR outcomes in a practical teaching framework which teachers can apply to literature they choose to teach.