Using Literature to Teach English: Methods and Examples
Literature in English Language Teaching
We must also mention some short stories or novels from the 18th and 19th centuries: Gulliver’s Travels (J. Swift), Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), A Christmas Carol (Dickens), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass (L. Carrol), Treasure Island (Stevenson), The Jungle Book (R. Kipling), Little Women (L. M. Alcott), Huckleberry Finn (M. Twain), and A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (J. Verne). All these books may be found in simplified and adapted versions.
Because of their authentic characteristics, brevity, repetition, musicality, and rhythm, nursery rhymes, riddles, songs, and limericks have great didactic potential in the classroom. Recent literature is also very interesting (J. K. Rowling).
Regarding literary genres: Narrative, Poetry, and Theatre…
Text Typology and Didactic Application
Let’s consider three main groups of literary texts and their didactic application.
Storytelling
By storytelling, we mean the narration of stories. It may be carried out in two ways:
- Advantages and disadvantages…
- Three stages in relation to listening: Pre-, While-, and Post-listening activities.
Poetry
Poetry is an excellent way to familiarize students with the phonetic and prosodic features of English. Two main poetic forms are likely to be used in Primary, especially with beginners: limericks (five-line comic poems following the rhyme scheme a-a-b-b-a) and rhymes (traditional verse commonly used to introduce children to poetry).
Songs
Working with songs in the English classroom can help us achieve important objectives in our lessons: vocabulary, pronunciation, stress… TPR and songs (Trace theory). Songs are an excellent device to focus our pupils’ attention on language: segmental and suprasegmental elements.
Techniques to Access Oral Comprehension
Listening is one side of an interactive process. The importance of listening is highlighted by B & Ellis. Learners require a generative set of procedural knowledge and strategies as a basic communicative competence from which more interactive capacity can grow. Greetings, simple questions, or commands from the first class are the initial interactive verbal tools for F.L. acquisition. Examples for classroom, schoolbag, everyday life…
Strategies we have to plan: listeners need reasons…need complete messages…recognize some gaps are not relevant…they can anticipate meanings…know what are they expected…
A second set of activities to develop listening capacity would be the use of questions with students. Then… time will come to complete utterances with additional information, new structures, and vocabulary…formulaic language. With Primary students, listening could be worked with short stories, songs, rhymes, or texts too. Listening Sub-skills regards to the purpose of the activity: Global, Selective, and Intensive.
Techniques to Initiate Reading Habits and Make Students Aware of the Poetic Function
As we have stated in a previous section, literature is a valuable resource in our English lessons, as the Council of Europe defines. How do we make our students read?
The ten top principles underlying an extensive reading program might be:
- Students read as much as possible.
- A variety of materials is available.
- Students can select readings.
- Reading should be related to enjoyment.
- Reading is a reward itself.
- Reading materials are adapted to the students’ competences.
- Reading is an organized activity.
- Reading is normally individual and silent.
- The teacher is just a role model of a reader for students.
- The teacher must keep a plan for reading.
Selection of appropriate primary texts and supporting resources: Richmond, OUP, Black Cat…publishers.