Teaching Literature (created Hania Bociek, adapted Hansjuerg Perino)
WHY?
- Valuable authentic material
- Cultural enrichment
- Language enrichment
- Personal involvement
WHAT?
- Relevant to life experiences, emotions or dreams of learner
- Language difficulty
- E.g. questionnaires on tastes and interests, short summary of 3 –4 options, stds can choose
HOW?
- Maintaining interest and involvement by using a variety of student-centred activities
- Supplementing the printed page
- Tapping the resources of knowledge within the group
- Helping the students explore their own responses to literature
- Using the target language
- Integrating language and literature
1. First encounter
1. Draw the learners quickly into the text, arouse their interest so they want to read on!
Warm-up / orientation- activities
Using the title and cover design
Ask questions, students speculate about characters, story…
Visual prompts
Pictures / objects of the central theme of a book (Dagger/ heart/ Picture of Verona / Balcony for Romeo and Juliet) students talk about theme, speculate…
Using the theme
Discuss about the main theme: Impossible love…
Key Words / Sentences
Students brainstorm on narrative links between the words, build their own story
Put beginning sentences in the right order
Author
Picture: Students speculate on biography, then find out
What happens next
Give students first paragraph, they continue the story, act it out or write it down
Writing Chapter 0
Students write what has happened before the novel starts
2. Maintaining momentum
Home reading activities:
Question and answer worksheets
Do it yourself questionnaires
Students, when used to working with questionnaires, they often enjoy devising one of their own for their classmates
True or false worksheet
Summaries with gaps/ incomplete sentences
Summary comparison
Students must decide out of two different summaries, which one is better, and argue for it
Jumbled events
Choosing an interpretation
Which is closest to their own ideas, inspires them to write one themselves, using elements of the ones handed out.
Choosing a moral
Series of morals given, students argue and create their own
Activities in the classroom
Retelling the story:
Snowball activity
Students divided into teams, each team is responsible for a chapter, presented on posters on blackboard
Graphic representations
Students make charts of plot-development, characters and their relations, of setting (time/place)
Continuing predictions
Decision points
Learners must write a sentence / paragraph to answer: why did X make this decision? take this step? change her mind?
Writing diaries
Students assume the roles of a character: they write diaries for their character, recording the events and the feelings
Fly on the wall
Students are “flies on the wall” of where the story happens: they write a comment from an objective point of view, adding their personal comments
3. Exploiting highlights
Writing activities
Connectors and summary writing
Students are given a list of connectors:
Furthermore, nevertheless, even so, however, meanwhile, on the other hand, to sum up, to make matters worse
They summarise the passage read at home using each and every of these connectors
Summarising the summary
Students form 3 groups, each writes a summary of the passage read with 70 words
They pass their summary to one other group, which summarises their summary in 35 words. This summary is now passed on to the third group, which reduces it to 17 words. Final versions are read out loud and changes discussed.
Creative conversation writing
1) Take scenes where there is no speech, students write dialogues.
2) Students sit in a circle. Each student writes the first utterance, imagining that they are character A. Then they pass their slip of paper to their right-hand neighbour. Everyone reads the utterance they have received, and, imagining they now are character B, write a reply to it. Then they pass the paper back to their left-hand neighbour, that is, the learner who originally wrote the first exchange. Each student is now character A once again. At the end of this activity, each student will have helped build up two dialogues, once as A and once as B.
Thought bubbles
Students write the “inner dialogue” that parallels the “outer dialogue” presented in the book
Cries for help
Often highlight scenes present a character in a difficult situation. Students write a note / letter to another character in the text.
Newspaper articles
How would a newspaper article present the highlight event of the story?
Epitaphs
A lapidary comment on a deceased character ( best, if examples are provided!)
4. Listening and reading activities
Mini reading aloud
Groups of three: Director, actors: stage dramatic dialogue, try to integrate feelings and of characters in your reading, director coordinates and controls rhythm, intonation etc…
Chose the statement
Different statements are given that comment an action / event in the book. Students choose one and explain their choice
Discussions based on questionnaires
Ex. Romeo and Juliet:
For a man/woman I loved, I feel sure I would
1. Move to another city rather than live without him/ her
2. Change my religion rather than live without him / her
3. Deceive or disobey my parents rather than live without him/ her
4. Give up my job…
5. etc
Debates
Many literary works suggest controversial issues that can give rise to interesting debates in the classroom
Example: Friendly persuasion
…of a course of action taken, of a character’s integrity…
Teacher provides helpful expressions for the persuader:
She’s so
He’s the most…. I’ve ever seen
I’ve never met anyone who is as… as she is
Accuse and deny
Stage a court room in which a character is the accused, students defend or accuse him, one is the judge.
Improvisations
Students are to suggest different outcomes of the story and act them out
Here and there
Here
How would a particular character be / react / move / talk if he were here, today? Where would he / she go in Zurich? What would he / she eat, buy, wear…?
There
What if the main character were not a male hero but a woman?
Or: Member of the class is chosen and “dropped in” a particular situation, either to replace the character or be involved
Discussion, writing or role play
Trailers
Short advertising clip for the book, usually designed with a “voice over” extolling the film, interspersed with extremely brief, intriguing shots of the most spectacular scenes
Moviemakers
Adapting a highlight to make one scene of a film
5. Endings
Cover designs
Writing a “blurb” for the back cover
Teacher gives examples first
Sculpting
One student is “the sculptor”. The names of all the characters of the book are written on pieces of paper an blindly chosen by the rest of the class. The sculptor chooses one character and asks him to stand, sit or take up any position or expression whish seems most appropriate to that character’s essential personality traits. Next character is placed in a distance according to the relationship to the first character and “formed” as well. Etc.
Point of no return
Students discuss what the p.o.n.r. is in the story, in pyramiding technique: Students decide on their p.o.n.r. in pairs, then in groups of four and so on….
What if?
Follow-up to p.o.n.r. Situation before the p.o.n.r.: What if circumstances had been different? Or characters? Discussion: If X had happened (If-sentences!)
Team competitions
Two teams, teacher asks questions of content. Who said this? When? What was the name of …?
Choosing highlights
Discussion, justify choices…
Round robin
Groups of 5. Task: Summarise story in 5 sentences. Each student writes first sentence, hands it over to the left, writes second… 5 summaries, in which every student has contributed one sentence.