Using literature at lower levels

Gillian Lazar

This article focuses on how literary texts can be used with elementary and
lower intermediate students. Common difficulties with using literature at
this level are considered, and the kinds of knowledge and skills which these
students need to develop are briefly mentioned. A series of tasks and
activities for exploiting three different poems is then presented. The types
of task and activity aim not only to help teachers overcome the difficulties of
using literature at this level, but also to extend the students’ grammatical
and lexical knowledge, and improve their overall language awareness.
Many of these activities can also be used with prose texts, such as extracts
from short stories.

Difficulties with The last decade has seen renewed interest in using literature in the
using literature language learning classroom. But can authentic literary texts be used with
students at the level of elementary or lower intermediate? A number of
difficulties immediately spring to mind.

Language grading Firstly, there is the issue of language grading. Many literary texts, whether
prose or poetry, are written in language which includes vocabulary,
grammatical structures, and syntax considered too complicated to be
included in the syllabus for learners at lower levels. There may be
rhetorical or literary devices in the text (such as complex metaphors)
which students might find difficult to unravel, or the language in the text
might be markedly ‘deviant’ in the way it breaks the usual norms of
language use (Leech 1973: 29-33). A well-known example of a ‘rule-
breaking’ literary usage is found in Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘A Grief Ago’,
where the word ‘ago’ is made to collocate with the abstract noun ‘grief’
rather than with a noun denoting a period of time (Thomas 1978: 49).
Teachers often express concern about using ‘deviant’ language with
students when these students have not yet even fully acquired the basic
rules of English grammar, syntax, and word formation.

Literary A second objection to using literature at lower levels relates to the literary
competence competence of the students, and hence their ability to generate valid
interpretations of a text. By literary competence is meant an implicit
understanding of certain conventions of interpretation which skilled
readers draw on when reading literature (Culler 1975: 113-15). For
example, skilled readers of a poem may be highly sensitive to the way the
formal properties of the text (such as metre, rhyme scheme, etc.) can be
said to reinforce the main themes or underlying meanings of the poem.
Students who do not read literature in their own language, or whose
ELT Journal Volume 48/2 April 1994 © Oxford University Press 1994 115

articles welcome
 language has a literature very different from literature in English, may
remain mystified or intimidated by the formal properties of the literary
text, without being able to suggest any interpretations of its meanings.
And even if students at lower levels do reach their own interpretation of a
text, they often lack sufficient proficiency in English to express it.

Motivation A further problem with using literature at lower levels is that it is

considered too highly specialized an activity to be of interest to less
advanced students. In addition, many teachers often have very limited
time in which to complete a syllabus, and consider including literary texts
in the lessons an unnecessary and time-wasting distraction, while students.
themselves frequently lack the interest and motivation to work with such
texts.

The needs of Having mentioned some of the difficulties in using literature with students
students at lower at lower levels, I would like to approach the problem from a slightly
levels different angle by focusing on what such students need most in their
learning. In terms of input, they obviously need to expand their
knowledge of lexis and grammar in English substantially. But even at this
level they also need to move beyond an understanding of the language
simply in terms of individual words or sentences. They need to start
becoming aware, for example, that discourse is sequenced and organized
in different ways; that words are linked with each other in relationships of
synonymity and opposition; and that the meaning of a text may not be
explicit, but needs to be inferred. In other words, they need to expand their
overall language awareness. Finally, despite their very limited proficiency
in the language, students need the challenge and stimulation of addressing
themes and topics which have adult appeal, and which encourage them to
draw on their personal opinions and experiences.

Tasks and I would now like to suggest various sequences of tasks and activities
activities which can be used to exploit literary texts with students at lower levels.
The first two sequences are in the form of student worksheets, while the
third is in the form of a teacher’s lesson plan. Each sequence is followed
by a brief summary of activities and some general comments. All the
poems on which they are based are provided in their full form in the
Appendix.

The intention behind these activities is not only to try to overcome the
kinds of difficulties commonly experienced when using literature at this
level, but also to go some way towards providing students with what they
really need in order to improve their knowledge of grammar and
vocabulary and expand their language awareness. Although all the tasks
and activities I suggest here are connected to specific texts, the types of
task and activity can be applied or adapted to other texts.
116 Gillian Lazar

articles welcome
Student worksheet 1
1 Look at the two words below. Around them write down anything that
they make you think of. Then tell your partner some of your
associations for these words.

2 Read the text below. If you don’t know the meaning of a word, look it
up in a dictionary. Then, with a partner, fill in the missing spaces by
using the words under the text. The first one has been done for you.

When . . .

When will I stop hearing Violins

and hear only

When will I stop seeing Grey

and see only

When will I stop hearing Scratches 5

and hear only

When will I stop being two

and be only

When will I stop feeling half

and start feeling 10

When will I stop saying tomorrow

and start saying

When will I stop trying

and start

When will I stop crying

and start 15

When will I stop humming

and start

When will I stop thinking

and start 20

When will I be free, when, when?

(Mustapha Matura)

singing Drums whole loving Colours

one laughing NOW Music doing

Literature at lower levels 117

articles welcome
 3 Look at the following two groups of words taken from the poem. Can
you add any more words of your own to each circle?

4 Now write a sentence about yourself beginning:

When will I stop

Stages in student The stages of the lesson on student worksheet 1 can briefly be summarized
worksheet 1 thus:
1 Warmer: Students free-associate around key words which embody
thematic polarities in the text.
2 Students complete a gap-fill activity.
3 Students make further associations around lexical groupings from the
text.
4 Students complete a sentence about themselves which is modelled on
one from the text.

Comments on It is worth making a number of points with regard to the kinds of activities
student worksheet 1 used in this worksheet. Firstly, asking students to make associations
around key words is a way of cueing students in to the themes and
underlying meanings in a literary text. Since students’ language skills in
English are very limited they cannot be expected to produce a fully-
fledged ‘interpretation’ of the text. But asking them to associate around
some of the key words in the text is one way of making students aware of
the thematic contrasts in the text. It is also a way of personalizing the
lesson and encouraging students to relate what they read to their own
experience. Activities involving associations around a word or group of
words can also generate rich cultural insights for students, since some of
the associations a group of learners has for particular words may be
culturally determined. The learners could be asked to compare their
associations with those which seem to be present in the text or with those
of the teacher.
A second point to make with regard to the activities described above is
that the aim of the gap-fill activity is to focus not only on individual words
but also on the way they are connected in the text. The words that students
are asked to supply in the spaces are linked to each other in interesting
118 Gillian Lazar

articles welcome
 ways. Sometimes this involves a relationship of antonymy (as in laughing
versus crying - lines 15 and 16). Sometimes it involves the linking of
words which form part of a lexical set (violins and drums are both part of
the lexical set of musical instruments). A gap-fill activity encourages
students to become aware of the many ways in which individual words are
connected with each other through the complex discourse of the text.
One last point to consider here is how a poem of this kind would fit into a
structural syllabus. The structure stop + gerund is often introduced later
than at elementary or lower intermediate level, so that it can be contrasted
with stop + infinitive. If, on the whole, the language of the text is easily
accessible to students, then it is probably better not to focus explicitly on
the difficulties of this structure. Its meaning should be clear from the
context of the poem. In other words, when using literary texts at lower
levels it is important to select texts in which the grading of the language is
generally appropriate, but students should also be able to cope with more
difficult structures provided that their meaning is clear from the context,

Student worksheet 2 1 Think of any children you know aged seven. Make two lists about
them:
* Things a seven-year-old can do alone without his or her parents.
* Things a seven-year-old can do only with an older person.
2 Now read the following poem. After you have read it, underline the
word in each sentence which you think is correct. The first one has
been done for you.

Latch Key
My best friend Danny come/comes/goes to dinner with a key
round his neck, tied/hung/stuck on with a piece of string.
At night when no one’s home he lets/puts/gets himself in,
even although/but/though he is only seven, only seven.
My mum says he’s too young and it’s alright/a shame/okay. 5
He sees/listens/watches TV alone and eats crisps left for him.
And Mrs Robinson - the old woman next door -
listens out for him. Though my mum says,
she is hard of hearing. What does/do/must that mean?
Danny’s mummy is never/always/sometimes rushing off somewhere, IO
all dressed up to the nines and sometimes,
when the taxi comes/arrive/drives she throws a kiss
like a piece of bread to a duck; it drops on our street
with a sigh. Then/So/But Danny scoops up his kiss
and comes into our house holding on to it. 15

Can Danny have/get/takes a bath with me? I plead,

and my mum sighs yes, she supposes so,
because he is only seven, only seven.
(Jackie Kay)

3 Put a tick next to the sentence which you think explains the words in
the poem:

Literature at lower levels 119

articles welcome
 a. ‘hard of hearing’ (line 9)
- you cannot hear very well
- you can hear very well
b. ‘dressed up to the nines’ (line 11)
- wearing very smart, formal clothes
- wearing very old, cheap clothes
c. ‘to scoop’ (line 14)
- pick something up very slowly
- pick something up very quickly and smoothly
d. ‘to plead’ (line 16)
- shout loudly because you are angry
- ask many times for something you really want

I4 Can you think of a title for this poem? Talk to your partner about it.

Stages in student The stages of this lesson can briefly be summarized thus:
worksheet 2 1 Warmer: Students are cued in to the themes of the poem by completing
two lists.
2 Students complete a multiple-choice reading task.
3 Students guess the meaning of difficult words from context.
4 Students suggest a title for the poem.

Comments on This sequence of activities aims to provide students with the kind of
student worksheet 2 grammar and vocabulary practice they need at this level. An obvious fit
here with a structural syllabus would be to use this poem to practise the
present simple. The multiple-choice activity is designed to focus on
grammatical correctness (e.g. ‘come/comes/goes’ in line 1), collocation
(e.g. ‘sees/listens/watches’ in line 6) and link words (e.g. ‘Then/So/But’
in line 14). But the narrative interest of the poem is such that a rather
ordinary multiple-choice activity is made more motivating for students.
Titles often encapsulate the main topic or theme of a literary text, so
asking students to suggest a title for the poem encourages them to make an
interpretation of it, and ensures that they have grasped what the themes or
topics may be, without expecting them to supply lengthy explanations in
English.

Lesson plan The following sequence of activities is to be used with an adapted version
of ‘I like that stuff’ by Adrian Mitchell. Not all the verses of the poem are
used in the classroom, although students can be given complete versions
of the poem to read for homework.

1 Divide the students into pairs, and give each pair one of the following
sentences on a slip of paper:
Lovers lie round in it
Pensioners get happy when they sit by it
Scotch is made with it

120 Gillian Lazar

articles welcome
 Cigarettes are lit by it
Tuna fish get wrapped in it
Broken glass is found in it
Elephants get sprayed with it
Legs come wrapped in it
Students have to work out what substance is being referred to in the
sentence. They can use bilingual dictionaries to help them with any
words they find difficult.

2 Give all the students the complete list of sentences in Activity 1. They
have to read through all the sentences, and try to match the original
sentence they were given in Activity 1 with one other sentence in the
list which refers to the same substance. For example, the pair with the
sentence ‘Lovers lie round in it’ should match their sentence with
‘Broken glass is found in it’ since both sentences refer to grass. Again,
students should use bilingual dictionaries to help them with this
activity.

3 Hand out copies of an adapted version of the poem. Ask students to fill
in the missing sentences in the poem by using some of the sentences
from the list in Activity 1.

I like that stuff

Lovers lie around in it.

Grass

I like that stuff

Tuna fish get wrapped in it

Nylon

I like that stuff

Elephants get sprayed with it

Water

I like that stuff

Cigarettes are lit by it

Literature at lower levels 121

articles welcome
 Fire

I like that stuff

(Adrian Mitchell)

4 Ask students, working in pairs, to write their own verse for the poem
which refers to any of the following substances:
PLASTIC GLASS MILK

5 For homework students read a complete version of the poem.

Stages of lesson The stages of this lesson are:

p/an 1 Students guess to which substance a sentence from the poem refers.
2 Students match sentences that refer to the same substance.
3 Students complete a gap-fill exercise by supplying whole sentences in
the spaces provided.
4 Students write their own verse using the verses in the poem as a model.

Comments on The set of tasks described above are more complex than those described in
lesson plan worksheets 1 and 2. They can be regarded as extended problem-solving
activities, and need to be staged very carefully so that students do not feel
overwhelmed by the level of difficulty of the language. It is important for
students to use bilingual dictionaries, since doing so can help to build their
confidence in attacking difficult texts. The text is a particularly useful one
for teachers who want to provide follow-up practice after teaching the
present simple passive and get + past participle. At the same time, all the
activities in the sequence help to develop students’ inferencing abilities.

Conclusions I began this article by mentioning some of the problems connected with
using literature at lower levels. Primary among these was the question of
grading of language. Clearly, it is not always easy to find texts where the
level of the language is simple enough for elementary or lower
intermediate level students, but it is certainly possible, even if it means
that most of the examples will be from contemporary literature rather than
from past centuries. Even texts which in structural terms are pitched
slightly higher than the level of the students can be made accessible. For
example, in Lesson 1 the structure stop + gerund is so integral to the
meaning of the poem that students will probably acquire it without being
taught it explicitly. In worksheet 2 some of the more difficult vocabulary
is dealt with by providing word definitions in very simple language. In the
lesson plan a very slow, thorough sequencing of tasks can help students
with the more difficult language in the text.
122 Gillian Lazar

articles welcome
 With regard to difficulties of interpretation, it is clear that students may
enjoy and understand the themes or deeper meanings of a text without
having sufficient oral skills to discuss them. There are ways of
encouraging students to develop their interpretive abilities, for example
by associating around key lexical items in the text (worksheet 1) or
supplying a title for a poem or an extract of prose (worksheet 2). Other
ways of encouraging interpretation might involve students in drawing or
sketching their impressions of a text, writing an ending for it (if it is an
extract), or choosing the best of three very simple interpretations or
summaries of the text that the teacher supplies.

Finally, we can exploit literary texts to increase the language awareness

and grammatical and lexical knowledge of students at lower levels by
using precisely those techniques and activities which are applied every
day in the classroom. Cloze, multiple-choice questions, guessing word
meaning from context, and matching activities are just some of the
procedures which can be used successfully with literary texts. Although
in this article the texts I use are poems, many of the tasks and activities can
be applied to prose as well. For example, cloze or multiple-choice
activities can be used with extracts from short stories or plays. By making
use of this everyday repertoire of activities we will no longer be
constrained by using literature as an end in itself. Instead, literary texts
can be used to extend the language knowledge and skills of students at
lower levels. Literature then becomes a very useful resource for language
learning (Maley 1989: 10).
Received May 1993

References Appendix
Berry, J. (ed.) 1984. News for Babylon - The Chatto
Book of West Indian-British Poetry. London:
When
Chatto and Windus.
Culler, J. 1975. Structuralist Poetics. London: When will I stop hearing Violins
Routledge and Kegan Paul. and hear only Drums,
Kay, J. 1992. Two’s Company. Glasgow: Blackie When will I stop seeing Grey
Children’s Books. and see only Colours,
Leech, G. 1973. A Linguistic Guide to English When will I stop hearing Scratches
Poetry. London: Longman. and hear only Music,
Maley, A. 1989. ‘Down from the pedestal: literature When will I stop being two
as resource’ in Literature and the Learner., and be only one,
Methodological Approaches. ELT Documents When will I stop feeling half
130. London: Macmillan. and start feeling whole,
McGough, R. (ed.) 1992. Strictly Private - An When will I stop saying tomorrow
Anthology of Poetry. London: Puffin Books. and start saying NOW
Thomas, D. 1978. Collected Poems 1934-1952. When will I stop trying
London: Dent. and start doing,
When will I stop crying

Literature at lower levels 123

articles welcome
and start laughing, Harps are strung with it
When will I stop humming Mattresses are sprung with it
and start singing, Wire
When will I stop thinking I like that stuff
and start loving. Cigarettes are lit by it
When will I be free, when, when? Pensioners get happy when they sit by it
(Mustapha Matura) Fire
I like that stuff
(Berry 1984: 49)
Dankworth’s alto is made of it, most of it,
Latch Key Scoobedoo is composed of it
Plastic
My best friend Danny comes to dinner with a key I like that stuff
round his neck, tied on with a piece of string.
At night when no one’s home he lets himself in, Man-made fibres and raw materials
even though he is only seven, only seven. Old rolled gold and breakfast cereals
My mum says he’s too young and it’s a shame. Platinum linoleum
He watches TV alone and eats crisps left for him. I like that stuff
And Mrs Robinson - the old woman next door - Skin on my hands
listens out for him. Though my mum says. Hair on my head
she is hard of hearing. What does that mean? Toenails on my feet
Danny’s mummy is always rushing off somewhere, And linen on my bed
all dressed up to the nines and sometimes, Well I like that stuff
when the taxi comes she throws a kiss like a piece of Yes I like that stuff
bread to a duck: it drops on our street with a sigh. The earth
Then Danny scoops up his kiss and comes into our Is made of earth
house holding on to it. And I like that stuff
Can Danny have a bath with me? I plead.
and my mum sighs yes, she supposes SO. (Adrian Mitchell)
because he is only seven, only seven. (McGough 1992: 164)
(Jackie Kay)
(Kay 1992: 49) Acknowledgements
The author and publishers are grateful for permission
to reproduce poems from the following copyright
material:
I like that stuff
‘When’ by Mustapha Matura from News for Babylon:
Lovers lie around in it. The Chatto Book of West Indian-British Poetry,
Broken glass is found in it J. Barry (ed.) 1984, published by Chatto and Windus;
Grass ‘Latch Key’ by Jackie Kay from Two’s Company ©
I like that stuff 1992 Jackie Kay, first published by Blackie
Tuna fish get wrapped in it Children’s Books; ‘I like that stuff’ by Adrian
Legs come wrapped in it Mitchell, from Strictly Private: An Anthology of
Nylon Poetry. R. McGough (ed.) 1992, published by Puffin
I like that stuff Books.
Eskimos and tramps chew it
Madame Tussaud gave status to it The author
Wax Gillian Lazar is a freelance teacher trainer, materials
I like that stuff writer, and lexicographer. She has worked in ELT for
Elephants get sprayed with it twelve years, and run training sessions on using
Scotch is made with it literature with teachers in England, Ireland, France,
Water Italy, and Spain. She has an MA in Language and
I like that stuff Literature in Education (TESOL) from London
Clergy are dumbfounded by it University Institute of Education. Her book
Bones are surrounded by it Literature and Language Teaching: A resource book
Flesh for teachers and trainers (1993) is published by
I like that stuff Cambridge University Press.

124 Gillian Lazar

articles welcome