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TEFL 10

TEACHING LITERATURE

Mihaela Tănase-Dogaru
Spring semester 2019

I. Why should a language teacher use literary texts with classes? The first reason – specific
examination requirements. But when there is no specific examination requirement and little extra time
available, why should we insist on teaching literature?
Question: what is the prevalent approach to teaching literature in Romanian schools (the one you were
exposed to in secondary school and in high school)?

A pattern Romanian teachers would usually follow implies loud reading of whole chunks of literary works (with
no previous discussion) followed by comprehension exercises which students do, more often than not, by
mechanically searching the answers in the text.

What is wrong with this type of teaching literature? What is wrong with the exercises in the textbook?
Do you think they really help students ‘learn’ literature?

In order to come up with better alternatives to the teaching of literature, we should see first what
reasons there are to insist on teaching it and whether these reasons are strong enough.
1. One of the main reasons is that literature offers valuable authentic material. In reading literary texts,
students have to cope with language intended for native speakers and with forms and conventions of
the written form: irony, exposition, argument, narration, and so on.
2. Cultural enrichment
3. Language enrichment
4. Personal involvement

Problem: the problem of teaching foreign languages has in recent years become guided by the
dominant aim of promoting the learner’s communicative competence. First and foremost, learners
should be successful communicators and not necessarily recipients of large quantities of knowledge
about the language. When, however, the teacher introduces students to the literature of the foreign
language, this communicative ideal vanishes. The way literature is presented often has a number of
typical features:
- sometimes, the teacher assumes the traditional role of imparting lots of information about the author,
the background to the work, the literary conventions that structure the text, and so on.
- sometimes, the teacher resorts to a massive process of explanation of the literary text or even to the
step-by-step translation
- at more advanced levels, the teacher may resort to the meta-language of criticism, that somehow
distance learners from their own responses
What is the problem with such teacher-centred approaches? Although they may lead to detailed
comprehension of the literary text, at least part of the students will feel that the teacher is guiding them
towards particular answers that he or she has in mind. We shouldn’t dismiss such approaches
altogether but complement them with student-centred activities so as to simulate students’ desire to
read and to encourage their genuine response.

II. The aims that should underlie our approach to teaching literature are intrinsically linked with the
problem of creating all necessary conditions for students to come up with genuine responses and
interpretations of literary texts:
1. Maintaining interest and involvement by using a variety of students-centred activities.
Any approach that is used exclusively in the classroom turns into a bore. All activities used in
language classes can be successfully used when teaching literature: role-plays, improvisation, creative
writing, discussions, and questionnaires.
2. Supplementing the printed page.
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Learning is promoted by involving as many of the students’ faculties as possible. By itself, the printed
page can be a cold and distancing medium appealing to a restricted area of the intellect. As teachers,
you should try to exploit the emotional dimension of literature and avoid remaining at the very
surface.
3. Tapping the resources of knowledge and experience within the group.
Although reading literature is usually an intensely personal and private enterprise, working with a
group can enhance the process. Very often someone else in a group will be able to supply the missing
link or come up with the meaning of a crucial word.
4. Helping students explore their own responses to literature.
Any activities you might use when teaching literature, they should be aimed at helping students to
develop, express and value their own responses. Thus, they will become less dependent on received
opinion and more interested in other perspectives.
5. Integrating language and literature.
On the one hand, students benefit from all communicative activities used in language classes. On the
other hand, the very tools we use in the language class can be employed so as to arrive to an
appropriate interpretation of the literary text. In other words, use language to teach literature.

III. A list of activities designed for first encounters with the literary work, when students need to be
attracted to the text, so that their interest is aroused.
1. Visual prompts.
Photos or magazine pictures are useful in eliciting the response of students to the central theme or
situation they are going to meet in a literary work.
2. Using the theme
The teacher takes a major theme from the text and explores it with the class. For example, in Somerset
Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence the main character suddenly walks out on his wife,
children, home, and job. The students are asked to imagine that they have suddenly decided to
abandon their current life situation. The teacher asks each student to write the note that he or she
would leave, which will be read by another students, who is asked to imagine he has just read the note
left by the most important person in their lives. They are to try to identify how they feel about what
they are reading and note down their thoughts.
3. Key words/sentences
The teacher selects a small number of key words/sentences from the first part of the text. In groups,
students brainstorm for possible narrative links between the words. When each group has decided on a
preferred pattern of connection, a story is built up orally or in written form.
You have an example of a worksheet designed for this type of activity to work with The Open Window.

In pairs, make up a short story (orally). It should contain the elements listed below. Be ready to tell
your story to other pairs:

Principal characters for your story:

Vera, aged 15
Mrs. Sappleton, Vera’s aunt
Framton Nuttel, a visitor to Mrs. Sappleton’s house

Elements to include in your story:

‘My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel, said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; ‘in the
meantime you must try to put up with me’.
‘Her great tragedy happened just three years ago’, said the child.
‘Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will
walk in through that window…’
In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window; they all
carried guns under their arms.
Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat.
‘A most extraordinary man, Mr. Nuttel’, said Mrs. Sappleton.
‘I expect it was the spaniel’, said the niece calmly; ‘he told me he had a horror of dogs.’
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!!! ‘Her’ refers to Mrs. Sappleton

!!! ‘the child’ refers to Vera

4. Questionnaires
Learners are given a questionnaire to fill in, to determine their attitude to the issues raised by the
book’s central theme. For instance, if you chose a literary text about moving and adjusting to new
surroundings, you might like to employ a questionnaire like the one on your handouts.

Imagine you are moving to a new location / get shipwrecked on a deserted island / go and live on the
moon. You can take with you only three things from this list. Which would you choose?
1. my radio/cassette player
2. my own wine glasses
3. my two favourite books
4. a teapot/coffee-pot
5. the teddy-bear (or other toy) I’ve had since childhood
6. a framed picture of my mother/father/lover
7. my diary
8. my calendar
9 other item (name it) ….

5. Comparing beginnings
The teacher takes three or four opening paragraphs from novels or short stories with fairly similar
beginnings and asks the class to respond to the contrasts. This is especially fruitful with novels in
which the main character is described in the first paragraph. Lists or grids can be completed showing
physical and psychological attributes, to act as a basis for prediction of future development.
Here are the beginnings of two novels (one modern novel – The Magus, written by John Fowles and a
19th century novel – Villette, written by Charlotte Brontë):

‘I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the
grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that
monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing my national
service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be.’

‘My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton. Her husband’s
family had been residents there for generation, and bore, indeed, the name of their birthplace – Bretton
of Bretton: whether by coincidence, or because some remote ancestor had been a personage of
sufficient importance to leave his name to his neighbourhood, I know not.
When I was a girl I went to Bretton twice a year, and well I liked the visit. The house and its inmates
specially suited me. The large peaceful rooms, the well-arranged furniture, the clear, wide windows,
the balcony outside, looking down on a fine antique street, where Sundays and holidays seemed
always to abide – so quiet was its atmosphere, so clean its pavement – these things pleased me well’.

7. What happens next?

This activity can take the form of a role-play. Students, in groups, discuss possible continuations, then
either improvise and act them, or prepare, script, and act them out.
An alternative activity is predictive writing. After the students have read the first section of the text,
the teacher asks them to write the story/dialogue/letter/note/telegram that follows from the situation in
the first passage. For less proficient learners, writing activities should involve something simpler like
form-filling.

IV. Activities that can be used to maintain students’ interest in longer literary works, such as novels,
plays, and so on.
1. Question and Answer worksheets – while they read the text, students supply the answers
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2. True / false worksheets - while reading the text, students decide whether certain statements are true
or false
3. Jumbled events – students have to put the events in a narrative in their correct order
4. Choosing an interpretation – students are given a series of different interpretations of events in the
passage they are reading. They can be asked to sort these into order of importance, choose the one
nearest to their own ideas, or write their own interpretation.

V. Complete sequences of activities: Poems (You and I by Roger McGough)

I explain quietly. You
hear me shouting. You
try a new tack. I
feel old wounds reopen.
You see both sides. I
see your blinkers. I
am placatory. You
sense a new selfishness.

I am a dove. You
recognise the hawk. You
offer an olive branch. I
feel the thorns.

You bleed. I
see crocodile tears. I
withdraw. You
reel from the impact.

1. The teacher gives the class the title and first stanza of the poem (written on the blackboard or on a
handout). He or she reads it out, explains any difficulties, then asks the students to say what the poem
is about. Who could ‘you’ and ‘I’ be? What is their relationship like? Do members of the class
recognise this situation? Do they ever feel misinterpreted? Are their good intentions sometimes seen as
aggressive by other people?
2. The teacher then gives the second stanza, but with gaps, like
You see both sides. I
…………………. I
am placatory. You
………………….

The teacher asks for suggestions as to what could complete these sentences.

3. The teacher then gives students in pairs the gapped third and fourth stanzas and asks them to
complete the missing sections

4. Comparing their versions with the original – class discussion

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Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.