Literature for Children and Young Adults

LLL Using of literature in language class A short story of Beauty and the Beast

Mgr. Libue Kolnkov

January, 2013

I teach an English language at the primary school. My students are 14 years old and their level of English is near A2. But it is a typical mixed-ability class. They are students of the sports school and that is the mail reason, why sport is the most important for them. They dont like learning and English is not interesting for them, too. The work in this kind of class is not easy. Maybe they would prefer topic about sport all the year, but it is not possible. I think, that literature became less popular than I was a child. Pupils often find reading boring.

I used authentic literature as a language learning material in the ninth class. Our task was to go through a short story of Beauty and the Beast. I chose this short small book because I found the link there with the exact curriculum or similar topic with our plan at the textbook. It was topic - describing people. While reading of authentic literature pupils are naturally taken to stories and using literature can increase their reading comprehension skills. Pupils can learn many things about life thought literature about culture and social background of main heroes in the story.

But due to three lessons a week I have not enough time for teaching English through literature. I would be able to work with the short story five lessons, but I have to follow the textbook. The right way is using of literature as recovery of lessons but only sometimes.

I think, that the reading literature promotes cultural understanding. And it is important to familiarize our pupils with literature. The story teaches about social values which can be easily transferred to modern life. We worked with the grammar and vocabulary, answering question - reading comprehension skills, skimming or scanning. The story was made as the picture book and these pictures help to develop children speaking, communication skills when they narrate the story or speak about pictures. It is nicely illustrated and texts are not long. Pupils could be demotivated as a reason of not understanding the text what they are reading. The right approach was teaching a set of vocabulary, phrases from the story at the beginning of lesson as a pre-reading activity.

It is good to know, that we can work with the literature text not only through Grammar Translation Method but we can use tools of Communicative Language Teaching. A short story of Beauty and the Beast is good choice for its authentic

input for language learning for example expressions of feelings, authentic dialogues are good for readers imagination.

I dont think, that this story text is very motivating for pupils only for reading, because they would prefer something from their normal modern life for reading itself. But I chose this story due to its moral aspect, too. In the other hand I can prepare really enjoyable activities during reading and post-reading period.

Cultural Awareness of this story is the same around the world, because it has the same universal concept full of love and hate, good and evil. I tried to learn my pupils go through the text without dictionary first and develop the skill guess the meaning in reading. The second step was using dictionaries for very problematic words. The text is a very good source for practicing grammatical structures, my pupils developed the syntactic knowledge as is word order in an English sentence and so on. The develop of critical thinking we saw in own pupils interpretation of story, pupils questions, and develop of thinking how it works nowdays for example discussion how important is an exteral beauty in modern life.

When I prepared my lesson plans I was aware of developing all four language skills reading, writing, speaking and listening as my teaching goals. We used the audio version of story. My pupils tried to write and devised the new end of a story. It was very funny. Some activities are enclosed in my lesson plans, too.

It was the first time when I used literature during lessons. But in the end it was great. From the first boring atmosphere when we were only reading to higher enthusiasm when we discussed the topic and fulfilled the exercises to the best end of our literature involvement and it was the drama lesson. My pupils pretended the story. One group played the normal authentic version and the second group the modern their own version. It was really great and I am happy that I did it. But in the end I have to say, that it was very time-consuming. It was worth it. I will do it next time. I think, that the last month of school year will be the good time for a new story.