Teaching Literary Texts in the Higher-Secondary Urdu Curriculum: A Proposed Teaching Model in the Light of the Pedagogical Potential of Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi’s “Coffee”

Abstract

Teaching literary texts through comprehension questions, vocabulary exercises, explanation, and examination-oriented activities may underutilize their linguistic, literary, cognitive, cultural, and creative potential. Recent research in literature education has emphasized active literary reading, critical thinking, dialogic interaction, reflective response, and students’ active engagement with texts. Against this background, the present study examines Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi’s essay “Coffee,” prescribed at the higher secondary level, as a curriculum-based literary text and develops a text-specific teaching model grounded in its pedagogical potential. The study adopts a qualitative textual and curriculum analysis approach. It examines the literary, linguistic, cultural, and intellectual features of the essay alongside the existing textbook exercises and teacher-guidance activities. The analysis suggests that “Coffee” offers meaningful opportunities for active reading, inferential comprehension, collaborative interpretation, close reading, analysis of satire and irony, linguistic awareness, cultural interpretation, critical literacy, creative expression, research, and reflection. Although several of these dimensions are already represented in the existing textbook activities, they are not consistently organized into a coherent instructional progression that moves learners from initial comprehension and response towards evidence-based interpretation, critical judgment, creative application, and reflection. On this basis, the study proposes a nine-stage teaching model comprising engagement and prior-knowledge activation, active reading, meaning-making and inference, collaborative interpretation, literary and linguistic analysis, critical reading, creative response, transfer and application, and reflection and assessment. Rather than presenting the model as empirically validated, the study offers it as an evidence-informed, text-specific pedagogical framework derived from the analysis of the prescribed text and its curricular treatment. Its effectiveness can be examined through subsequent classroom-based and empirical research in higher secondary Urdu education.

Keywords: Urdu teaching, literary text, higher secondary curriculum, critical thinking, literary understanding, Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi, Coffee, teaching model