Readings That Help Students Read the World

English.Edu : Journal of Language Teaching and Research Vol. 7, No. 2, July 2007, p. 159-172Literature is known as an effective aid to help students improve their reading skills, it is also a good way to let students learn about differences across cultures. However, the teaching of literature should never stop at those two skills, instead, literature teachers nowadays are faced with a bigger challenge- to use literary texts as a means to introduce students of literature classes to the world. This is where an appropriate selection of reading materials comes to importance. Motivated to provide fun to students, literature teachers are sometimes tempted to present only nice stories to their students, which could bring disadvantages in the long run, because students are not well-informed about their surroundings and therefore could not find solutions to problems they face. Therefore, this paper emphasizes on how important it is to start presenting our students with the darker side of life through literary texts and hopefully, with a balanced exposure to both the bright and dark sides of the world, students will learn much more than extended reading skills and about different cultures. The starting point of this paper is a discussion about Nathanael Hawthorne's short story, 'The Minister's Black Veil', a classic story with a puritan era setting that teaches us to have enough courage to take any possible step to initiate social transformation, even if it has to be by controversial deed