The position of literature in the English as a Second Language class has changed during the decades. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Grammar-Translation Method placed literature in a privileged situation. Afterwards, in the middle of the 20th century, with the development of structuralism, literature was downgraded to a second position in language teaching. During the 1970s-1980s, Communicative Approach kept on refusing literature. And finally, during the 1990s and so on, literary texts were included in English as a Second Language classroom, so it is important to highlight that it was not until the recent times that the teachers included literary texts in their classes.
A selection of books from different periods of the history of English speaking countries and Europe has been done. These books can be a reference for the classroom for students to acquire a cultural background either in the original way or in the adapted way, depending on the difficulty of the text and of the language attached to the historic period.
The difficulty of Old English makes it impossible for our students to read medieval texts in its original form; nevertheless, if we really want our pupils to grasp the essence of Middle Ages in Britain we could select Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as it provides a good description of the medieval atmosphere. Here, we could also select other literary texts such as The Tales of Robin Hood and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D'Arthur or the adaptation of the story by Terence Hanbury White in the nineteenth century (The Once a Future King).
Whenever dealing with Renaissance literature (sixteenth century) William Shakespeare stands as a majestic figure impregnating the whole period with his magnificent words. We, as teachers of English should not deny our students the gratifying pleasure of listening or reading to Shakespeare's plays. Just in the same way Old English was overcome by graded texts, Middle English would represent no problem for primary students. Moreover, specific adaptations for children have been edited all through history so that children can read the bard. One of the most famous classic adaptations of Shakespeare's play is undoubtedly Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, an illustrated edition published in 1807 that reduced the archaic English and complicated storyline to a simple level that children could read and comprehend.
During the seventeenth century the French writer Charles Perrault laid the foundations of the Fairy Tale in France. His stories include Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, and Cinderella. Numerous translations into English of these stories will be very useful for pre-primary or the first stage of primary school.
The eighteenth period is the period in which the novel as it is understood nowadays appeared. During this prolific epoch adventure stories and novels with young boys as protagonists emerged. This way, although they were not works specifically intended for children, they have been traditionally associated with children's literature. Among these novels we may find Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones or Jonathan Swift's Gulliver Travels.
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