The aim with this study is to find out the role of literature in language education. More specifically, this essay focuses on discovering how literature can be used to learn and acquire the English language. The study will show how reading literature can benefit students’ proficiency. The paper is based on two parts. The first part is an interview section where four English teachers have been interviewed in order to learn what teachers’ thoughts are on the role of literature in the courses in English. The teachers that have taken part in the study work at the same school in a smaller municipality. The second part of the study examines the availability of literary material in three current ELT coursebooks that the interviewees use in their teaching. This was done by a page-by-page analysis of the coursebooks.  The results of the interviews suggest that through reading literature students can acquire skills such as expanded vocabulary and proficiency. Moreover, the study shows that the coursebooks available to the teachers fail to provide enough reading material, nonfictional or fictional, to develop the proficiency the authors of the coursebooks claim students will acquire by using their coursebooks. / Denna studie ämnar undersöka litteraturens roll i språkundervisningen. Mer specifikt fokuserar studien på att undersöka hur litteratur kan vara ett verktyg för att lära sig engelska. Studien ämnar visa hur läsning kan främja elevers språkliga förmåga. Uppsatsen är uppdelad i två delar. Första delen fokuserar på resultaten av intervjuer med fyra engelsklärare som ger sina åsikter om litteraturens roll i engelskundervisningen. Lärarna som har deltagit i studien jobbar på samma skola i ett mindre samhälle. Den andra delen studerar det litterära materialet i tre läroböcker som lärarna använder i sin undervisning. Detta gjordes genom att analysera läromedlen sida för sida. Resultaten antyder att elever genom att läsa litteratur kan utveckla ett flertal förmågor, bland annat få ett större ordförråd och utveckla sin språkliga förmåga. Studien antyder också att läromedlen som lärarna använder sig av inte lyckas att förse lärarna med tillräckligt många litterära texter för att eleverna ska kunna utveckla sin språkliga förmåga till den grad läromedelsförfattarna påstår att de kan genom att använda deras läromedel.

ABSTRACT GENDER REPRESENTATIONS IN ELT COURSEBOOKS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY Yilmaz, Elvan M.A., Department of English Language Teaching Supervisor: Prof. Dr. H&uuml / sn&uuml / Enginarlar September 2012, 135 pages In all educational institutions ELT coursebooks are used as a guide to teach the language. However, the role of a coursebook as an agent of socialization and its effect on the development of gender roles is usually underestimated. Gender biased coursebooks might affect the learners in a negative way in the process of gender socialization. Most coursebook writers revise the first editions of the coursebooks in order to modernize them and to meet the needs of the learners in a changing world. The aim of this thesis is to investigate whether writers and publishers take the gender issue into consideration while they are revising the coursebooks. In order to address this issue, three recently revised English language coursebooks were compared with their first editions. To be able to compare the coursebooks, their contents were analyzed. Six operating areas of gender stereotypes were set as the categories of the content analysis / presence of female and male characters in the coursebooks, the number of characters represented as family members, distribution of occupational activities, division of household activities, variety of leisure activities and the adjectives used to describe each gender. Throughout the whole study it was observed that the representations of female and male characters in the first editions were closer to the stereotypical representations. By contrast, in the last editions the representations of the genders have ideally become more balanced in all investigated categories of gender stereotypes.