Dear colleagues! In the previous posts I tried to transfer to you the main conception of BritLit project and told you about the first day of its session in Moscow. I just wanted to add that as home assignment our two groups of teachers were to choose from 3 short stories one we’d like to produce some kit for. Somehow, it turned out to be not an easy choice.

The school group were given these three short stories: An Afternoon by Ian Rankin, Two Kinda Truth by Farrukh Dhondy & Slog’s dead by David Almond. After a heated discussion the teachers chose Slog’s dead. The choice wasn’t an easy one as the story contained some serious problematics connected with life & death and there was a regional dialect used by the characters. It’s interesting to mention that not long ago there was introduced the new British visual edition of this story which contains text and pictures equally.

Our university group were to choose between The German Boy by Ron Butlin, The Safehouse by Michael Faber & My Daughter, the Fox by Jackie Kay. Our choice was My Daughter, the Fox which tells us the story of a woman who literally gave birth to a fox. Though there’s some strong language in the story and the process of birth-giving is presented in details (which makes gender factor worth taking into consideration), this work maybe considered as metaphorical as instead of a fox we probably see a child with disabilities.

So all we had to do was to work at the kits (sets of tasks) which included several important parts:

·         Preview – fine introduction of the story is essential for future work;

·         Pre-reading – it’s always important to get the ss ready to all problems they can face while reading;

·         Context – it may be crucial for better understanding and includes the factor of cultural awareness

·         Language Focus – this turned out to be not as important as it seems at first as it’s crucial to understand the text as a whole.

All this also includes chunking – the division of the text into some logical parts.

Finally, all the hard work was done and now our kit is available for every teacher visiting

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/try/resources/britlit

Once again I’d like to thank British Council for such an opportunity and I’m dreaming of the further discussion of this topic here during the Bloggathon!