Literary competence includes a number of skills and sub-skills which the teacher should identify in order to plan his/her lessons and to offer his/her students clear procedures and techniques for dealing with literary texts. The effective reader should master certain skills and strategies which allow him/her to convert the words on the page of a literary work into literary meanings. He/She knows certain conventions about how a literary text should be read and understood.
Let us focus for a moment on the notion of "literary competence," a phrase made famous by Jonathan Culler, although the idea that more educated readers understand literature better than less educated readers has been around since the beginning of formal education. It is one thing for a reader to understand the mother tongue of a second language writer in order to appreciate the work, and quite another for a critic to have ´literary competenceµ in the mother tongue of the same writer.
Literary competence is both reader·s and critic·s competence. Multilingual competence is certainly a bonus for the critic whose primary equipment, after all, is literary competence prior to critical competence.
Students need to be able to identify and identify with the experiences, thoughts, and situations which are depicted in the text. They need to be able to discover the kind of pleasure and enjoyment which comes from making the text their own, and interpreting it in relation to their own knowledge of themselves and of the world they inhabit.
Simplified readers can also help to promote literary competence by introducing to students well-constructed and interesting material which demands some kind of inference from the reader.
It is hard to define what is involved in literary competence but it includes the ability to infer a message.
In the case of foreign language learners, that competence may or may not be developed, depending on the degree of exposure to literature in the first language.
Such motivation may not always be best encouraged by classic, canonical literary texts; any text which stimulates a sufficient interest to read between the lines will be good choice.
To some extent literary and language competence cannot be easily separated for one will always be dependent on the other. An appropriate level of proficiency is required before a text is read.
Advertisements, for example, frequently contain fascinating examples of play between words, related metaphors and formal patterns which can be creative and entertaining, and some teachers believe more can be made of reading advertisements in the target language as a way of encouraging linguistic-literary competence and of creating better access to texts.
Our main point here is to stress the importance of creative uses of language in the making of literature and to note that literary competence is intimately connected with the ability to perceive how patterns of language reinforce the message.
r K u Figures of speech such as: metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, epithet, apostrophe, oxymoron, metonymy. u Narrative and poetic devices such as: plot, story, character, point-of-view, setting; irony, satire, paradox; assonance, alliteration, rhyme, rhythm. u Specific text features such as: theme, style. u Literary trends such as: Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism. u Literary forms such as: the diary, the epigram, the heroic poem, the mock-heroic poem, the ode, the sonnet u Literary genres such as: novel, play, short-story, poem, sketch.
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