On these pages you will find links to articles connected with the teaching of literature.
Complete poetry resuscitation
A lot of teachers get the same look - the sigh, the rolling eye, the slump. "We're going to be doing poetry in the next few classes". You cringe through it, they cringe through it. I have been lucky enough though to discover a few things about poetry and writing though which have inspired me and brought me back to believing in my ability to teach it, and my ability to help others love it. To paraphrase Robin Williams in 'The Dead Poet's Society', poetry doesn't need to be complicated to be beautiful. This has become my mantra in the last year.
Mark Augustine, British Council, Malaysia
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Using poems to develop receptive skills
I like to bring poetry into the classroom because I believe that it is important and motivating for students to work with authentic texts. I find that poems work well because it is possible to work with a whole text, and sometimes with more than one poem in the same lesson
Christina Smart, British Council
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Using poems to develop productive skills
You and your students might already enjoy reading and listening to poetry in your own language and perhaps in English too. Poems are, after all, authentic texts. This is a great motivator. Poems are often rich in cultural references, and they present a wide range of learning opportunities. For me, the aim is to teach English through poetry, not to teach the poetry itself, so you don't need to be a literature expert.
Christina Smart, British Council
Creating a class play
"Studying German at school was a thoroughly depressing experience for me. Grammar translation, authoritarian teachers and constant tests. I can remember very little of what was 'taught' but something that I have never forgotten was thanks to a German native-speaker teacher who came to our school for one term and encouraged the class to take part in a play."
Richard Frost, British Council, Turkey
Using drama texts in the classroom
"In this article, I try to define what I mean by language learning through drama/theatre texts, outline some of the benefits it can bring to the language learning classroom and some of the differing methods and approaches that can be utilised to fully exploit the potential of drama and theatre texts."
Henry Robinson, MA Applied Linguistics and ELT, LCTL DIP TESOL
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Storytelling - benefits and tips
"We often give stories to our students to read, but how often do we tell them a story? This article looks at the benefits of storytelling and gives advice on performance skills"
Adapted from a workshop by Paula Stoyle, British Council, Jordan
Motivating pupils to read 2
"This is the second of two articles that looks at ways to apply the process model of motivation as proposed by Dornyei (2001) to a number of suggestions and techniques for making the challenge of reading authentic literature accessible and motivating. This article describes ways to maintainl motivation, the first one shows how to generate this motivation."
Gail Ellis, Head of Young Learners Centre, The British Council, Paris and Special Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Nottingham
Motivating pupils to read 1
"This is the first of two articles that looks at ways to apply the process model of motivation as proposed by Dornyei (2001) to a number of suggestions and techniques for making the challenge of reading authentic literature accessible and motivating. This article describes ways to maintain
motivation, the second one shows how to maintain this motivation."
Gail Ellis, Head of Young Learners Centre, The British Council, Paris and Special Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Nottingham
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Learning English through children's literature
"A story provides the starting point for developing a wide variety of language and learning activities involving children personally, creatively and actively..."
Gail Ellis, Head of Young Learners Centre, The British Council, Paris and Special Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Nottingham
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