The British Council has one best kept secret. They are an excellent resource for Language teachers, with a significant section devoted to British Literature. While some of the materials are considerably more EL than Lit based, there are still some good poems and short stories that you can develop your own activities from. All lesson packages come with downloadable PDFs of the original text, as well as pre and post reading activities.
Here are some of their ideas that I've siphoned out and may be useful:
Short Story Ideas
"Pink Bow Tie" by Paul Jennings
This is a good story for teaching Lower Secondary students plot twist (and it's funny to boot). However, the British Council is primarily targeting it's resources at ESL/EFL learners. Nice worksheets are attached, including a good section on the characters and some thought-provoking questions on punishment, school rules and honesty. However, you might still want to pull it in a more Lit-ish direction by looking at some of the literary techniques used. Possibilities include plot and tension.
Poems (contemporary) Ideas
Fish Swimming, by Moniza Ali
This page contains an excellent resource of a short poem and a shape poem activity. Very useful if you're thinking of a follow-up activity for Sec Ones after they've learnt about metaphors in poetry. It's also very multimodal with a flash animation and images of artwork done by other students based on the poem. The only possible minus point (if it is such) is that the worksheet's layout is a tad disorganized and instructions are not always clear.
Articles on Teaching
Most of the articles are devoted to language issues, however, a few of them, in particular "Using poems to develop productive skills" provides a good list of reasons for why the learning and teaching of poetry need not be a tedious technical affair. There are also some good suggestions for activities and possible learning objectives that can be met through poetry teaching. In particular, I like how the article talks about how poems can be used in the classroom to practice and enhance critical reading.
Source: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/
I feel that this is a great site for both teachers and students. I especially enjoyed the "Pink Bow Tie". In addition to having worksheets that are bold, this site considered the needs of teachers as well. However, I do agree with Su Zhen that the worksheets are disorganized, and may be too simple for the standards of secondary school students in Singapore. Perhaps the teacher using this resource can make use of the interesting stories and guides and come up with a lesson plan which caters to the learning needs of local students instead.
ReplyDelete"Pink Bow Tie" is a really interesting read! I think fun stories like this can potentially be a lot more engaging for students. Thanks for introducing this online gem. I do agree that the worksheets are a little too simple, but they can be easily tweaked.
ReplyDeleteUnder the section "Articles on Teaching", I found the following strategy rather useful.
"As a way in to a poem, I might play some background music to create the atmosphere, show some pictures to introduce the topic, and then get students to think about their personal knowledge or experience which relates to this topic."
I once sat through a poetry recital class where the tutor used Ryuichi Sakamoto's Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence as background music for a poem. The music really added to the emotive aspects of the words and caused me to feel a lot for the poem. This is probably something I might want to use in the classroom next time. =)
Jaslyn
Apart from the "Pink Bow Tie", there are a couple of interesting activities offered on the website that teachers can consider using. However, not all are suitable for secondary school students. For example, the one on Romeo and Juliet can potentially be used in lower secondary classrooms to teach Romeo and Juliet or any other play. Basically, getting the students to play-act the characters can help in their interpretation, understanding and remembering of the main characters and at the same time, it allows for creativity in the classroom where students can think about how they want to represent the act.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to suggesting that we use songs in the teaching of literature, this website also offers several ways of using songs apart from merely interpreting it. For example, they suggested that we have students translate a chosen song from a foreign language into English. This can be interesting because students are made to choose the most suitable words to suit the song and this can make them more aware of literary devices.
Hi Su Zhen, this is indeed a useful website. I am with the idea of using poems to develop productive skills. The idea of teaching English through poetry is excellent, particularly since the general consensus among people is that poetry is a purely technical affair and that a certain (usually high) level of proficiency in English is the prerequisite to grasping and doing poetry. Both the teacher and the student would benefit from the incorporation of poetry into English lessons and not merely restricting it to literature lessons. This may also aid in reviving interest in poetry, particularly when coupled with appropriate tools and instruction. However, as with many things, this idea has its own set of pros and cons as well. It might backfire and leave students further disengaged, particularly if the fear/dislike for poetry resides in them. We must thus be meticulous in regards to student interests and text selection, and assess text accessibility. There is also a writing activity that I particularly like: “Genre transfer presents a lot of opportunities for writing practice; letters, diary entries, radio plays, newspaper articles, agony aunt columns all based on the original text from a poem”. This is definitely one innovative idea that I would love to implement in the classroom – English or English literature!
ReplyDelete