Teaching English through literature: The function of novel in English language teaching in Iraqi universities

The aim of this study is to examine the function of the novel in the English Language-Teaching (ELT) classrooms of Iraqi Universities based on university lecturers and students' opinions, perceptions and experiences. Furthermore, a primary objective is to re-examine the difficulties and shortages present in these classrooms in order to offer potential solutions to these challenges. Finally, the types of literary texts preferred by lecturers and students in acquiring English language proficiency is also of interest in this paper. The research method in this study was the administration of questionnaires to 100 students and 60 lecturers from a variety of Iraqi universities. Each questionnaire consisted of 11 questions involving both quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data were inserted into SPSS 19 then subjected to a crosstabs and chi-square test per question. According to collected data, majority of students (70%) and lecturers (65%) believe that the novel is a profitable language resource which has a vital function in Iraqi Universities' ELT classrooms. Consequently, they think the novel should be a mandatory component of these classrooms. Nevertheless, both educators and students observed some shortages with and faced difficulties pertaining to the use of literature in the language classroom. The identified shortages and difficulties by both students and educators are similar, with few minor differences. The majority of participants stated difficult language and contexts of selected novels to be the most common difficulty faced in classrooms. Another common issue was stated to be a lack of linguistic and literary background on behalf of students. To overcome these problems, they advise that selected novels should parallel student language competency levels and written in contemporary, simple, and interesting language in order to overcome the above-mentioned problems. Besides this, participants identified a variety of advantages of utilizing the novel in classrooms, for example the enrichment of student language and improvement of overall understanding of the language as well as the introduction to English-speaking cultures and conversations styles. Regarding the chi-square test, there was no statistical difference between student and lecturer views, as P-values for all questions were greater than .05 (P  .05). Keywords: ELT, Literature, Novel.