The integration of English literary texts into English language classrooms across science, engineering, and business disciplines: pedagogical impacts and implications for writing instruction in tertiary education in Bangladesh

This study investigates the impact of integrating literary works into the English language classrooms, specifically in teaching writing, within the Faculties of Science, Engineering, and Business at the tertiary level education in Bangladesh. Although Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and the Grammar Translation Method (GTM) are widely popular in EFL classrooms, reaching internationally recognized writing proficiency standards remains a challenge. This deficiency is likely due to the limited availability of linguistically enriched materials for instructors of non-English majors. This study employed a mixed-methods design, combining quantitative analysis of students’ pre- and post-literary writing performance with qualitative thematic analysis of interviews. The study is theoretically informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) – focusing on meaning-making, vocabulary, syntactic organization, figurative language and discourse. The results clearly indicate that students demonstrated higher performance in vocabulary range, syntactic variation, figurative language and critical thinking ability after the systematic inclusion of literary texts. SPSS was used for statistical analysis of student performance, and NVivo software supported the thematic analysis of qualitative data. The quantitative analysis showed a statistically significant shift between pre-and post-literary writing performance, F (9,10) = 4.80, p = .011.