Catedra de Limba si Literatura engleza EFL Methodology IIIB

TEACHING LITERATURE
In the last few years we have witnessed an upsurge of interest in the teaching of literature in the EFL classroom. In this unit we will explore how the teaching of literature could be incorporated into the English classroom in a way which is both accessible to pupils and methodologically principled. By literature we mean authentic examples of poems, plays, short stories, novels, whether these are studied in their entirety or as extracts. By the end of this unit, you will be able to: explain what factors you need to consider when using literature anticipate possible problems and find ways of overcoming them explain the difference between successful and unsuccessful literature readers justify the use of literature in your classes design specific tasks and activities for teaching literature.

1 Why Teach Literature?

Think first! Before you read this section, think of a few reasons for using literature in the English classroom, and write them in the space below. Check your answers as you read this unit.

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1.1 Authentic Literary Material

In Romania, as in many other countries around the world, literature has a high status. Consequently, many pupils may experience a sense of achievement at using material which is highly valued, particularly by native speakers of English. When the pupils have some knowledge about the Romanian literature, then studying some English literature can provide an interesting and thought-provoking point of comparison. This may be also true of those of the pupils who do not read much literature, but enjoy telling stories. Many textbooks in use offer a wide variety of authentic texts in English. They contain authentic newspaper articles, advertisements, timetables, menus, cartoons, labels, etc. Some of them also include some examples of authentic literature, too, whether poetry, fiction or drama. Literary materials expose pupils to fresh and unexpected uses of language as well as complex emotional responses. Literature can be particularly gripping in that it involves children and teenagers in adult dilemmas, problems or in a plot.

1.2 Cultural Background

English literature can provide our pupils with access to the AngloSaxon culture. However, the relationship between a culture and its literature is debatable, since literature cannot be seen as factual or as a realistic documentation of society. And yet, pupils do acquire cultural knowledge from reading literature. Reading literature in English raises the pupils awareness of the social, political and historical events which form the background to a particular literary text. Moreover, literature provides a way of contextualising how native speakers might behave or react in a particular situation. The description of a wedding or of a funeral might familiarise the pupils with typical rituals. Such descriptions may also provide insights into the way the participants to these events express their feelings and emotions. In other words, using literature enables the pupils to gain useful perceptions about how native speakers describe and evaluate the experiences of their society.

1.3 Language Awareness

Some teachers express concern that in reading literature, pupils are exposed to uncommon vocabulary and unusual uses of language and wonder whether literary language illustrates the usual rules of syntax, collocation and cohesion. It is true that in literary texts, the usual rules and patterns that we are trying to teach may be broken or bent by some authors. Here are two examples in which the authors (Isaac Rosenberg and Dylan Thomas, respectively) reverse syntactical patterns: Sombre the night is or, replace a noun denoting a time period by an abstract noun: A grief ago The question then is: are such original and unconventional uses of
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language going to confuse our pupils?

1.4 Language Acquisition

In Romania, pupils have fairly limited access to spoken English, and much of their language acquisition is stimulated by the written word. In this respect, literature provides meaningful contexts for processing and interpreting new language. While reading a literary text, the pupils encounter unfamiliar vocabulary. As they are listening to the text either read aloud by the teacher or recorded on cassette, they may be able to formulate guesses as to the meaning of new words. Their guesses are facilitated by their understanding of the relationship between the speakers (if there are several) or the intonation used. Then, if you ask them to act out the extract themselves, using appropriate intonation, they will be more likely to internalise the new words. Also, by encouraging the pupils to read extensively on their own, you will be helping them to increase their exposure to English and thus facilitate their acquisition process.

1.5 Interpretative Skills

Literary texts are often unclear or ambiguous, and demand the readers active involvement in discovering hidden implications and assumptions. That is why literature may be seen as a source of material used for developing pupils abilities to infer meaning and to make interpretations. By encouraging your pupils to actively engage in drawing inferences and testing out their hypotheses about what something means in a literary text, you are helping them to develop their capacity of interpretation. This skill can then be transferred to other situations where the pupils need to make an interpretation based on implicit or unstated evidence.

1.6 General Educational Value

Besides the linguistic benefits of using literature, we may also think of its wider educational function. Literature stimulates the pupils imagination; it helps to develop their critical faculties and increases their emotional awareness. If you ask your pupils to respond personally to the texts you give them, then they will become more and more confident about expressing their own opinions and feelings in English.

1.7 Source of Classroom Activities

Literature is also a valuable source of material, since it provides useful opportunities for helping your pupils to develop their reading skills, both intensive and extensive. Literary materials can also be used to encourage the pupils to increase their vocabulary and to stimulate their writing. As many literary texts are rich in meanings, language and message, they can be effectively used in promoting activities where the pupils need to share their feelings and opinions, such as discussions, role-plays, group and pair work.
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2 Teaching Context
Before deciding whether it is appropriate to teach literature to your pupils, you need now to look more closely at your teaching context. Your decision about teaching literature will depend on the needs of your pupils and the type of syllabus you have to follow. If you decide that it is appropriate to use literature, then you need to choose your material by analysing in detail the criteria for selection.

2.1 Pupils Needs

First you need to identify your pupils needs closely so as to assess whether using literature will help them to meet their needs. Think first! Before you read on, write down the needs that you think your pupils may have, in order to decide whether to use literary texts with your pupils.

Check your answers as you continue reading this section. In order to identify your pupils needs, ask yourself the following questions: What are my pupils overall goals or reasons for learning English? Will using literature help them to reach these goals? When you teach in a primary or lower-secondary school, the goals of your pupils may be not easy to define. However, using literature may be a welcome addition, as it is a motivating and enjoyable way of increasing the pupils general sensitivity to the English language. However, you need to make sure that the pupils are aware of your reasons for including literature; otherwise they may consider it irrelevant. What areas of weakness do my pupils have? Reading skills? Limited vocabulary? Poor pronunciation? Will the use of literature help them to overcome these weaknesses? After you have identified specific areas of weakness in your pupils, either through testing or by day-to-day assessment, you may decide that using literature can become a novel and useful way of helping your pupils to overcome some of their problems. If, for instance, some of them are having problems with pronunciation, getting them to listen to recordings of simple poems in which difficult sounds appear, before asking them to read those poems aloud, may provide effective pronunciation practice.
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 What are my pupils intellectual and emotional needs? Can literature help in meeting some of these needs? Try to be sensitive to your pupils general educational and affective needs. Such needs can be very difficult to identify since the pupils themselves may be uncertain as to what they are. Through intuition and honest discussion with your pupils you can begin to arrive at an understanding of these needs. The use of literature can help your pupils to overcome their frustrations as learners of English and as human beings. Even elementary-level pupils, who are educated and literate in Romanian, may feel frustration at their very limited resources in English. Asking them to do activities based on an authentic, but simple poem in English, may help to challenge them emotionally and intellectually, while still working within their restricted knowledge of English. They may also feel a sense of achievement at reading an authentic English text.

2.2 The Syllabus

You may also need to have another look at the syllabus and your timetable. How flexible is the syllabus? Can you add to it? Do you have enough time to add to the syllabus? Does the syllabus already include literature? If it does, do you have any choice as to what literature to teach? Do your pupils have to pass an exam at the end of the year or study cycle? Is there a literature component in that exam? If you think of giving literature as extensive reading to be done at home, ask yourself how much available time the pupils have to study on their own. They may have very little time available to do any extra studying or reading. It may be more practical to confine any literature teaching to classroom study and to short poems or literary extracts.

2.3 The Selection of Literary Material

After you have clarified what the needs of your pupils are and what the syllabus allows you to do, you may wish to consider the selection of material. There are two categories of criteria used in examining closely the materials for classroom use: (a) those referring to the pupils and, (b) those related to the material itself. a) pupil-related criteria After considering the needs of your pupils (their overall goals in learning English, their linguistic weaknesses, their linguistic and affective needs), you need to look at some more detailed criteria for choosing materials: pupils age: is the material chosen appropriate to the age of your pupils? pupils interests: are the themes or the topic of the text likely to fit in with the interests of your pupils? pupils intellectual maturity: are your pupils intellectually mature enough to cope with the issues and dilemmas raised in a particular text? pupils emotional maturity: how far will your pupils be able to respond to the feelings or emotional complexities expressed in
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a particular text? Is the text likely to stimulate your pupils involvement? pupils linguistic ability: how advanced are your pupils? Is their language ability sufficient to cope with the text? pupils literary competence: to what extent are the pupils already familiar with certain literary conventions? How much of this kind of knowledge do they need to cope with the text you have chosen? pupils cultural background: how far will the pupils cultural background and their social expectations help or hinder their understanding of a text? How much of this background will you have to supply? pupils motivation: to what extent are your pupils likely to be motivated by studying a particular text?

b) text-related criteria When examining a text for its suitability, bear in mind the following questions: length: How long is the text? Do you have enough time to work on it with the pupils? Will they be discouraged if the text is too long or too demanding? Can you use only sections of the text? How much background information is needed to make the chosen text comprehensible to your pupils? language: how difficult is the language in the text? Will your pupils be able to cope with it? To what extent is the language of the text deviant from the usual rules of English? Are your pupils familiar with these rules so as to be able to analyse the effect the deviances produce? exploitability: what kinds of activities or tasks can you devise to exploit a text? Are these likely to be interesting and useful to your pupils? Can you devise activities similar to those your pupils are familiar with? Are there other resources (e.g. video film) from which the pupils can view selected episodes or library materials providing information about the author? syllabus fit: is the text likely to fit in with the rest of your syllabus? genre: what kind of genre will work best with your pupils poetry, fairy tales, drama, stories? Your choice will be determined by the amount of time available and the level of the pupils. Pupils at lower levels can be encouraged to borrow graded readers from the library. At higher levels you could use authentic texts.

3 Success in Reading Literature

Research on reading strategies has tried to define the strategies used by successful and unsuccessful readers. Here is a list of successful reader strategies. Successful readers
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decide on a reading purpose for example, they follow the development of a specific character in a story; choose a reading approach (e.g. skimming, scanning, reading
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for detail) which is appropriate to the given text and their purpose in reading it; read the title, look at illustrations, etc. and make hypotheses about the meaning of the text; predict how a story will develop; check their predictions against what they read, modify or reformulate their hypotheses; use their knowledge of the world; tolerate vague meaning until they can clarify it by skipping unknown words and taking chances to guess at meaning; use context clues (e.g. preceding and succeeding sentences and paragraphs) to guess at unknown words and expressions; use dictionaries sparingly; summarise as they read along; organise the information by taking notes, drawing diagrams, semantic maps, etc.

The strategies of the successful and the less successful readers offer us insights for the teaching of literature because they identify those strategies that can be explicitly taught. Thus, when teaching literature we should: be explicit about the reason for an exercise so as to encourage the pupils to read with a purpose and to assist them in gaining control over the reading strategy that the exercise requires them to use; include instructions that offer useful hints and good working procedures; include exercises that build comprehension skills, from simple ones such as true/false to more complex ones such as those that require them to make inferences about the text; help pupils make explicit the inferences that are implicit in the text and to which the writer has assumed the readers will have access. We also need to draw their attention to the hierarchy of actions, states, events, and help them to differentiate between main and secondary points, summarise and paraphrase. Also, we need to encourage our pupils to summarise as they go along or to draw diagrams, flow charts, or tables. These can help the pupils to organise the events in a story in a visual form that shows the relation of the events (chronological, cause and effect, etc.)

4 Teaching Literature
During the reading of literature, like during the reading of any kind of text, the readers make sense of what they read by decoding the linguistic items (lexical and grammatical) and relating this information to what they already know the background information, acquired through ones experience of the world. If the readers linguistic knowledge is weak at any point, they will compensate by drawing on background knowledge, and vice versa. During the reading process the readers try to give the text a coherent interpretation, making predictions and searching for confirmations or rejections. What they bring to the text is as important as what they find in it. The following principles of teaching
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literature attempt to capture these insights into reading: activate existing background knowledge. Relate the content of the text to the pupils own cultural experiences. This can be done as a pre-reading activity, when pupils reflect on and discuss what they already know about the topic of the literary text. This helps them to relate what they read to what is already familiar and known to them. encourage prediction Allow the pupils to formulate hypotheses about the text before reading begins. This helps them utilise the background information they possess and arouses their interest in the text. It does not matter if the predictions are incorrect as long as they are alert to what follows in the text to see whether it matches their expectations. fill in the background knowledge where it is missing Make explicit presentations of the cultural, historical, and/or social context of the text. explain the genre of the text Explain what genre the text belongs to and the discourse structure of the text, if necessary. This may be a novel, a play, a poem, etc., and it may be organised as a description or as an argument, etc. assist word and sentence-level comprehension You can do this using vocabulary exercises, glossaries, etc. put the text together again After you have discussed or analysed bits of it return to the text as a whole. Below are a few ideas of activities used for teaching literature. When choosing such activities do not forget that some of them work better with some kinds of texts, others work better with certain kinds of pupils. Like any other reading activities, the activities used for teaching literature can be classified into pre-, while- and post-reading ones.

4.1 Pre-reading Activities

The aims of the pre-reading activities are to provide the pupils with any necessary background information to understand the text better and to stimulate their interest. Here are a few ideas for pre-reading activities: ask the pupils to write or tell their own stories from the title and then compare these with the actual story in the text; ask the pupils to recall the main points of a text previously read so that they can compare it with a new text as they read it; let the pupils build free associations around an important word in a text, and write down as many words connected with it that they can think of. As they read the text, they can tick off the words that appear; organise a discussion of controversial (true / false) statements about the theme or topic of the text, etc.
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4.2 While-reading Activities

This type of activities increases the pupils confidence and interest while they read the text. Such activities may consist of: listening to an accompanying recording of the same text; providing notes about difficult vocabulary or unexplained cultural information to which pupils can refer while reading, etc. While-reading activities can also assist pupils with basic understanding of the text. These can take various forms: comprehension questions about the contents of the text. These could be also true / false questions, multiple choice questions or wh- questions; the text can be divided into sections and the pupils are asked to answer comprehension questions about each section before they move on to the next section; pupils are provided with two or three brief summaries of a text, and have to decide which one is the most appropriate; pupils complete a map or diagram showing the events in the text, etc.

4.3 Post-reading Activities

These activities are meant to encourage pupils to express their own opinions and personal responses to what they have read. They may also provide fluency practice. simulations or role-plays in which the pupils take the part of characters in the text they have read, and interview each other or improvise scenes from the book; pupils discuss statements arising from the issues or themes in the text, etc. Other post-reading activities may exploit the literary text to stimulate the pupils creative writing abilities: pupils write a few paragraphs about what happens after a poem or short story has ended; pupils rewrite the story or poem in a different style e.g. as if it were a paragraph from an autobiography, etc. Other post-reading activities have as goal to familiarise pupils with new or difficult vocabulary in the text: pupils match words or phrases in the text with their dictionary definitions; pupils match words in a text with a list of their opposites; pupils are divided into groups. Each group has a different list of words from the text, for which they have to find the meaning by using dictionaries. The groups then explain these words to each other, etc.

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5 Sample Lesson Plan

This lesson plan is based on material taken from Chilrescu, M., Andriescu I., and Paidos, C., 1998, All Right, Manual de limba englez pentru clasa a VII-a, Iai, Polirom. Some of the activities are based on ideas in Lesson Two, Unit 4, pp. 52 53. The focus of the lesson has been changed, a few activities have been remodelled and new ones have been introduced. Aims: To provide intermediate pupils, who are highly literate in Romanian, with the opportunity to read some authentic English literature; To reinforce pupils knowledge of English sentence structure by means of a sentence-completion exercise and a gap-fill exercise; To encourage pupils to focus on different relationships between words, such as antonyms and collocation. Level: lower intermediate and intermediate pupils Time: 30 35 minutes Aids: a few pictures of various trees in spring and autumn and the textbook (Chilrescu, M., Andriescu, I., Paidos, C. 1998, All Right, Manual de limba englez pentru clasa a VII-a, Iai, Polirom). Assumptions: pupils are familiar with the structures and vocabulary in the poem, e.g. past tense of regular and irregular verbs, basic colour adjectives pupils are motivated to read a poem pupils are familiar with grammatical terminology like verb, adjective, noun. Anticipated problems: Some of the vocabulary is a little difficult, e.g. scarlet, crimson. The new colours will be taught using the palette on page 52. Also difficult to explain: rustic hollow and jolly hands around. Procedure: Warmer (10 minutes) a) Organise the class for pair work. One pair partner is given some pictures of trees in spring, while the other has pictures of trees in autumn. Each pupil has to write three sentences based on their pictures, beginning with cues like: 1. Chestnuts, oaks and maples 2. Last spring, trees 3. Blossoms new fallen from the trees spread a 1. Weather 2. Last autumn, the weather 3. Leaves new fallen from the trees flew Pupils can use the pictures to help them, or can simply invent their own sentences. Partners exchange sentences, and mark each others sentences.

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While-reading (10 minutes) Ask the pupils to look at the (gapped) poem and explain to them that they have to decide which words fit in the gaps. Give the words that have been removed from the text on the board, in random order. Encourage the pupils to work in pairs on this activity, too. When the pupils have completed the gap-filling exercise, ask one pair to read out their version, and see whether the others all agree. Explain any difficult words like crimson, scarlet, flutter, rustic hollow, jolly hand around. Encourage the pupils to use dictionaries to check the word meaning if necessary. Go through the poem again, reading out the answers and asking the pupils to justify their choices. Post-reading (5 minutes) This is the discussion part of the lesson. Pupils discuss in pairs: Who came to the party? What does party mean here? How were the guests dressed? What did the guests do at the party? What do the pupils think of the poem? Do they like it or not? Why? Vocabulary Follow-up (10 minutes) a) Remind the pupils of the set of colours, and of the party associations and collocations: to give a party, to lead the dancing, to lead the band, to balance to ones partner, a party ends / closes. b) Ask the pupils to do exercise IX in the book, page 53: Colourful language. c) Give the pupils this list either on the board, or as individual cut up words to find out collocations: light yellow indigo black white red crimson scarlet sheep see olive green look in the pink violet turquoise blood purple lie blue orange

d) Feedback. The solutions are: black sheep, green light, look in the pink, white lie, see red, blue blood. Homework Explain to the pupils what a garden party is. Ask them to write a short story about an imaginary garden party, including as many colour words as they can, and the following collocations in what they write: gave a party, led the dancing, led the band, played, and closed.

Summary
In spite of the little attention given to the teaching of literature in the textbooks on the international market, literature has always been recognised as an effective tool in learning English in this country. Literature represents valuable authentic material which provides for the more subtle and meaningful learning in depth of a foreign language. Literary texts, on the other hand, represent a valuable source
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of civilisation knowledge. The very nature of literature with its ambiguity can provide a stimulus for expressing different opinions. In literature there is no correct solution to how you experience a text, and a class discussion will be genuine communication. Reading literature, as well as talking and writing about it, is both an affective and cognitive process. Meeting a literary text can give our pupils an emotional and personal experience and give room for reflection. This emotional appeal can involve the pupils in the learning process.

Key Concepts
text authenticity cultural background language awareness interpretive skills teaching context pupil-related criteria of text selection text-related criteria of selection successful and unsuccessful literature readers principles of teaching literature pre-, while- and post-reading activities

Further Reading
1. 2. Brumfit, C. and Carter, R.A. (eds.), 1986, Literature and Language Teaching, Oxford University Press Collie, J. and Slater, S., 1987, Literature in the Language Classroom, Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-16 (Part B of the book contains a resource bank of activities)

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