1ο Γυμνασιο Μάνδρας
8/09/12
Why use literature?
There are many good reasons for using literature in the classroom. Here are a few:
- Literature enables learners to use multiple language forms and encourages interaction. Literary texts can effectively generate discussions due to their manifold layers of meaning.
- Literature educates the whole person by relating the learner to the world outside the classroom.
- Raises cultural and intercultural awareness by exposing the learner to universal concepts such as love, hatred, death, nature, which are common to all languages and cultures. Becoming acquainted with the similarities and even differences between cultures can develop our understanding of the whole world.
- Emotional intelligence is promoted through the sharing of feelings and opinions and the attitude learners develop toward the characters, situations and values.
- Literature promotes critical thinking. Literature is fertile with ideas to critically look at.
- Using literature helps build up a learner/reader centered approach since it can lead to fruitful discussion among the students and allows students to select and engage to what may function as stimuli separately to each one of them.
B Junior High School Class (advanced level): Project on simplified/graded readers
Materials: simplified/graded readers: - Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, -The Secret Garden by F.H Burnett, - Lorna Doone by R.D Blackmore. (Readers were carefully chosen, few unknown words, around 10-12 per book).
Aim: to familiarize students with the content of literary texts through the creation of a poster for each book that would epitomize the aspects of the novel that rouse the students interest.
Students were free to choose whether to work individually or in groups.
Warm up: students were encouraged to look at the back cover and the story introduction on the first page of the book and talk about their anticipations. They were also encouraged to search on you tube for videos based on the specific books.
Post reading phase:
Stage 1): After reading the novels each group was asked to present a summary of the content of the book.
Stage 2): A discussion phase followed during which several issues arose such us the need for information on the era the books were written, the setting and the authors. Connected to the era were also the clothes people wore. Another issue discussed was what the clothes revealed about the characters. The following spider gram helped me lead the discussion on characters. During this phase students had to take notes to use in the creation of posters. The end product was a free choice of whatever aspect of the novel they wanted to deal with e.g. one student decided he wanted to deal only with the characterization of the main protagonist and nothing else.
Stage 2: students were asked to pick a scene and act it out ( Some chose to parody a scene )
List of activities you can do with a simplified reader novel:
- Ask students to assume the role of a character they like and write a letter to another character in the book keeping in mind the traits of this character
- Students give their own ending to the story
- They pick a quote a character says, write it out and display the quote with a picture
- Important objects in the book ,who they are important to, why they are important
- Ask them to guess what the main characters might have in their pockets , handbags or desk drawers
- Suppose that your favourite character had a homepage or was on facebook what sort of information or graphics and photos would he /she include in his her homepage?
- Make a picture book to portray your favourite scenes from the novel. They can either design their own book or they can use the internet to do that.
- A collection of graded readers can also be used for extensive reading purposes (www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/extensive-reading, iteslj.org/Articles/Bell-Reading.html )
A useful site for those who would like to teach poetry: http://favoritepoem.org/videos.html
Other useful sites: Teachingliterature.org, Literature Circles: collaborative learning in the EFL classroom The 46th Annual International IATEFL Conference & Exhibition
References
Prowse, Philip (2000) ?When the reading stops? English Teaching Professional 15, pp 10-11
Peter, Watkins (2001) ? Getting the most out of your graded readers? 21, pp 18-19
Teacher: Maria Barberi
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