TEACHING LITERATURE

Compiled by: Jamal Maringo
  
What is the reader-centered approach to literature?

·       The reader-centered approach, based on reader-response criticism, emphasizes the individual as a reader-responder. It argues that reading a literary text is part of a complex process that includes a collaboration between the writer, the text, and the reader.

·        A text is re-created every time someone new reads it, and it becomes, in the process, increasingly richer. The text is a stimulus that elicits responses from us based on our past experiences, our previous reading, our thoughts, and our feelings.

·        In this reader-response approach, the text acts on the reader and the reader interacts with the text; therefore, this analytical method is often referred to as transactional analysis.

·       The reader-response critical theory teaches us that there are no absolutes.    It enables us to examine the complexity of human behavior and motivation, the difficulty in ascertaining right and wrong, and the interdependencies involved in any social construct.

Objectives of the reader-centered approach

·         To encourage individual readers to feel comfortable with their own responses to a literary work.

·         To encourage the readers to seek out the reasons for their responses and thereby come to understand themselves better.

·         To encourage the readers to recognize, in the responses of others, the differences among people and to respect those differences.

·         To encourage readers to recognize, in the response of others, the similarities among people.

The Role of the teacher:

The teacher's responsibilities in effecting a successful reading experience in young people:

• Bring children and books together.
• Give them as many different types of literature as possible.
• Encourage honest and open responses
• Challenge them to explore those responses and learn something about themselves
• Provide them with the critical language that they might clearly express their responses
• Encourage toleration.
• Encourage mutual understanding.

1.       Talking about the front cover picture

Cover pictures may suggest some f the ideas in the story. It is a good idea to use this picture to arouse the interest and eagerness to read the text. Picture can stimulate a lot of discussion and enable students to begin to predict what the story might be about. Think about “Unanswered Cries”.

Try to encourage your own students to be imaginative and come up with their own ideas. Be willing to accept all the contributions given by the students. There is no right or wrong answer in this activity.

·         Write up a set of questions which you think will help your students talk about the cover picture.

2.       Discussing the title of the book

Book titles are in most cases designed to attract a potential reader and can be used effectively as a way of introducing the book to the students. Questions can be asked about the title, key words can be discussed and students can be encouraged to ask their own questions. The main purpose of the activity is to promote interest in the book and to ensure that students understand the full implications of the title.

·         You can use a spider gram to activate this item.

Usually the book title can be discussed together with the cover picture. It is probably best to do this before handling out the book to the class.

3.       Introducing the reader through the author

Background knowledge about the author is a good starting point when introducing a new book to the class.

Teachers can do a short or long author studies, depending on available time. To make this active, you can show the students two or three book that they have read lower down the school and ask them to fill in the chart to show what is the title and who is the author of the book.

You can use this chart to fulfill your task.

Author	Book title

4.       Discussing the setting of the book

The setting is extremely important to a story. It can have immense effects on the plot and the characters. The setting can do more than affect plot events. It can also establish the atmosphere, or mood, of a story or a specific scene. Read the short paragraph printed on the back of the cover of the book. Discuss the paragraph with your students emphasizing what the story is about.

5.       Examining the chapter headings

Chapter headings (if there are) can be used to generate discussion about the story. They often give a brief summary of parts of the story.

6.       Choosing key passages from the book

To develop student’s interest in a book, a teacher has to select one or two key passages which can be used t introduce the story. Such passages can be read out aloud, even before the students have started to read the book. The passages must be carefully selected so that they can be understood independently. Follow up questions can be used to get the students to discuss what they think of the key issues in the passage. To make this better, you can write two or three guiding questions for the students to consider whilst listening to the passage being read.

7.       Reading key passages loudly

Select the passage from the book. Make sure you are familiar with the content of the passage so that you can read it aloud without hesitation. Prepare the students by asking them some warm up questions about their own experiences.

The aim of this activity is t try to relate the content of the passage to the students’ own lives. If the students begin to feel that the content of the book is close to their own experience, they will be motivated to read the book themselves.

COMPREHENDING THE TEXT

1.       Matching information

2.       Using pictures

3.       Comprehending the detail

4.       Likes and dislikes

5.       Reading for a purpose

6.       Read and understand

UNDERSTANDING THE STORY

1.       Following the sequence

2.       Information transfer

Students need help to understand the story as they read through the chapters. This means devising activities that will enable the students to work through information from the book ia logical manner. Completing a chart, by filling in the required detail is a helpful way of organizing information and useful way of revising the important facts in a chapter.

3.       Looking at key points

After completing a chapter or two of a reader, it is often useful to help students revise the key ideas in each chapter before they continue reading. Students should be encouraged as much as possible to talk about what they have read and to practice processing the information through further discussion and writing.

Ask the students to prepare an overall sentence to try to summarise the main point of the chapter(s).

4.       Re – telling the story

Students need to have an overall understanding of the stories they read. By asking key questions the teachers can lead students to retell the main idea of the story. The aim of this activity is to enable students to retell the story in their own words, whilst concentrating on the main events.

This activity can be well done using a flow chart showing series of events.

LOOKING AT THE MAIN ISSUES

1.       Using important symbols

Ask some of the students to provide symbols they know and in turn to come and draw them on the board. The class should try to guess the meaning. Ask the students to look for other symbols in the novel which are especially significant.  Finally, ask the students to draw four or five symbols in their exercise books and state clearly what they symbolize in the story.

2.       Identifying the theme

3.       Identifying subsidiary themes

4.       Thinking about themes

This activity can be done to check whether students have grasped the idea of Key/ Main issues I connection with their readers. The purpose of this task is to encourage students to think out ideas for themselves and to discuss them openly in the classroom. This is very good practice for answering examination questions whilst e pressure. It is advisable that before this task students should have plenty of experience attempting many of the other tasks and activities in the book.

Ask students what are the main issues that the author raises in the book. Encourage students to give their own answers, providing help where they have difficulty expressing themselves.

GETTING TO KNOW THE CHARACTERS

1.       Character sketch

Character sketch helps students to concentrate their thoughts on the main features of a character. Such sketches help to provide a summary of the key characteristics of the important people in the readers and can be very useful for revision purposes.

Your students will enjoy making the spidergrams. Try to encourage them to illustrate their work by putting a picture or a drawing in the centre of the spidergram. The finished works can be mounted on card and displayed at the back of the classroom.

2.       A character diary

Character diary is the activity that students are asked to note down the major happenings/ events that involve individual characters in their readers.

List some of the main events in any character’s life as portrayed in the book, but not in their correct order, then ask the students to put the events in their correct order of sequence. This can be best done as a group activity so that each group takes responsibility for one particular incident.

3.       Who am I?

This activity can be used at the beginning of the lesson to motivate the students. If a class has covered more than one reader, two or more characters can be given at the same time and students have to say who they think the character is.

4.       Matching characteristics

Students need to revise and emphasize associations between characters. This activity requires students to match the correct description together with the character. T is a suitable activity after the book has been completed and the students are ready for their final revision. After first practicing with the teacher, students should be able to make up their own matching exercises.

ACTIVITIES TO USE WHEN TEACHING LITERATURE

Chain story

A Story Chain is a simple method of passing a story around the class, giving each student plenty of practice in storytelling. Within the group one student starts to report the event and then hands over the report to another member of the group who continues the story. Possibly, three or four link might be considered the most optimum as the truth that long chain stories are avoided.

Writing a dialogue

Writing a dialogue is a useful follow up activity to help students remember what they have read. In such activities students are given the opportunity to express their own feelings and to say what they think about the happenings described in the book.

As another type of follow up, students can be asked to dramatize their written dialogues.

Impromptu speaking

This is a speech and debate individual event that involves a five- to eight-minute speech with a characteristically short preparation time of one to seven minutes. The speaker is most commonly provided with their topic in the form of a quotation, but the topic may also be presented as an object, proverb, one-word abstract, or one of the many alternative possibilities.

This activity helps students to develop confidence in expressing themselves orally. This activity can begin by providing student with a variety of questions for which they should first find answers. This should involve discussing the relevant parts of the book in detail in their groups.

Book Reports

A book report is not just a summary of the plot of the book. For example, students can make up a new ending, write new episodes, rewrite the story from a different point of view, write a poem about the book, rewrite the story as a play, etc. Students can also be book reviewers for the class. The opinions of their peers tend to carry far more weight with children than the opinions of adults.

A KWL chart

This is a graphical organizer designed to help in learning. The letters KWL are an acronym, for what students in the course of a lesson, already know, want to know, and ultimately learn. In this particular methodology the students are given the space to learn by constructing their own learning pace and their own style of understanding a given topic or idea. The KWL chart or table was developed within this methodology and is a form of instructional reading strategy that is used to guide students taking them through the idea and the text.  A KWL table is typically divided into three columns titled Know, Want and Learned.

K What I know	W What I want to know	L What I learned
Write the information about what the students know in this space.	Write the information about what the students want to know in this space.	After the completion of the lesson or unit, write the information that the students learned in this space.

Name dropping

This activity can help students to develop their skills in selecting and interpreting details from the story concerning different characters. In this activity students complete mini- character sketches by writing a character’s name vertically and supplying suitable descriptive terms of that character which begin with those letters.

This activity is a useful vocabulary reinforcement exercise.

Book Discussions

Integral to most book discussions are the questions posed by the reader, and questions can be posed to elicit varying levels of response. There are four levels of questions:

·         Factual or memory questions: to ask the readers to recall facts from the story or poem: plot incidents, character identifications, details of the setting, and so on.

·         Interpretation questions: to ask the readers to make inferences and draw conclusions from the facts of the story or poem. These questions may require analysis or synthesis.

·         Application questions: to ask the readers to consider the story or poem in a larger context and to focus on further extensions of the theme, style, imagery, symbolism, etc. Application questions ask us to draw on our own experiences and help us to see the relationships between literature and life. Here is where the personal response to literature comes into play.

·         Evaluation questions: to ask the readers to critically evaluate what they have read and to articulate their reasons. This is the beginning of the acquisition of critical taste and judgment.  Remember that with most application and evaluation questions, there are no clear right or wrong answers, only answers that are more convincingly supported than others.

A cross word puzzle

This activity brings lots of ideas you can try in the classroom to help students develop an interest in the main characters of the book they are reading. This activity helps students to read and remember details about characters by filling in names to match the description given. As a revision activity it can provide a good challenge and can most easily be done in small groups of 3 – 4 students.