Materials Developed to Teach Literature, History and Language (Part 2)

Approaches to Literature in the classroom

Collie and Slater (1987: 5-7) encourage the inclusion of stories in the language classroom, as literature provides valuable material, contributes to cultural and language enrichment and encourages personal involvement. In addition, Ferradas (2003: 406) supports the presence of literature in the EFL classroom on the grounds that it contributes to language development by “revealing the creative and expressive potential of language and giving learners access to new sociocultural meanings”.

Traditionally, reading has been administered in the ELT classrooms following two types of approaches: intensive and extensive reading. In broader terms, intensive reading may be described as the practice of reading to study the linguistic aspects of the text, calling the attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers, and other surface structures to obtain a literal meaning of the text (Brown, 1989). Extensive reading occurs when students read large amounts of high interest material, usually out of class, concentrating on meaning, reading for gist and skipping unknown words. According to Day and Bamford (2002:139), these materials must be within the learners' reading competence in the foreign language.

Robert Hill, as cited in David Hill (2013: 93), suggests a third approach named an expansive reading approach. It highlights the use of reading activities to go beyond the original text and explore areas such as the biography of the writer, the historical and cultural context, intertextuality, among other issues. Culture and history can be taught as students learn the language, by means of graded readers. The essential feature of these texts is the narrative, which will facilitate understanding and engagement when reading fiction whose historical context and cultural implications may be opaque. In the words of Robert Hill, in an expansive reading approach ‘the text becomes a springboard to improve language skills and to explore historical background, cultural connections and other topics suggested by the text” (Hill, 2013: 93)

The procedure taken into account to design these materials is Hill’s expansive reading approach, in which the text, in this case a graded version of Oliver Twist and a fragment of its original version, becomes a starting point to improve language skills and to explore historical background and cultural connections without overlooking the aesthetic aspects of literary texts. The version published by Express Publishing has been chosen among a great variety of collections that offer this title because it fits my context in two aspects: it matches students’ A2 level, which is necessary for them to read texts on their own; and it doesn’t contain distractors such as glossaries or activities in between chapters, which may make students loose motivation to read text (Tomlinson, 2013: 176).

Principles of learning and teaching

In order to avoid an ad hoc, spontaneous and intuitive development of the unit, I will delineate the principles of learning and teaching which guided the process of writing of these materials and which facilitated coherence and consistency, working as a framework.

1. Exposure to rich, meaningful and comprehensible input of language in use.

Students need to be exposed to specific language items and features many so that they can understand and store them for later use. Nation and Wang (1999, in Harwood, 2010: 87) state that controlled graded readers are valuable resources in this respect, since items are repeated with “an optimal space between repetitions”

2. Authenticity of materials in terms of text and/or tasks.

Widdowson (1998, in Mishan 2005: 13) claims that authenticity of texts alone is a contradiction since “Reality [...] does not travel with the text [...] What makes the text real is that it has been produced as appropriate to a particular set of contextual conditions. But because these conditions cannot be replicated, the reality disappears”. Thus, the development of these materials will emphasize what students and teacher do with the text than its occurring in a “real” environment. In fact, the text is an adaptation of a literary text whose context of production is far removed from the context of reception. What makes it “authentic” is the purpose it is applied to. Following these presuppositions, authenticity is not brought into the classroom exclusively by means of resources, it resides in the objective that teacher and students need to reach as a result of their interactions with the text.

Hill (1997: 58) takes this issue further by claiming that the authenticity of graded readers is “irrelevant”, since importance should be directed to extent to which these texts achieve the purposes for which they were produced and brought to the classroom. The author adds that the Extensive Reading Foundation have promoted the name “Language Learner Literature (LLL)” in order to avoid the prejudice against graded readers. (Hill, 2008)

3. Affective and cognitive engagement.

Hill (1997) states that graded readers provide a model of the target language which is accessible for learners due to the controlled and reduced code. In addition, as students are drawn to stories and they generally want to know what happens next, it gives learners an immediate purpose in using the language. Stories evoke different feelings of enjoyment, pleasure, happiness, empathy, which are likely to influence acquisition of the language, since, in the words of Tomlinson (2003; in Harwood, 2010: 89) positive emotions appear to stimulate deep processing. Learners need to think and feel whilst experiencing the language in order to acquire it.

4. Noticing of salient features in the input.

Tomlinson (in Harwood, 2010: 93) maintains that when students are offered opportunities to notice patterns and features about the language for themselves, they are more likely to develop language awareness. Graded readers offer exposure to the language as well as opportunities to practise and consolidate by means of repetition.

5. Opportunities to use the language for communication in context.

Materials should encourage students to go beyond basic communicative competence so that they can develop their ability to use the language fluently, accurately and effectively in varied situations and contexts (Tomlinson in Harwood, 2010: 95). Input is a crucial factor for language acquisition, but output, which is defined as language produced for communication, provides learners with opportunities to systematise the language, to receive contextualised feedback and to stretch the learner’s strategic competence to negotiate meaning. Consequently, the author believes that “setting learners achievable communicative challenges is likely to be more useful than providing easy practice”.

6. A text-driven approach to materials

Tomlinson (2013: 69) claims that children are “naturally drawn to stories” and, that storybooks produce better results than traditional coursebooks, which are generally used with older learners. To add more benefits, the author believes that the language of stories is paramount for children to develop their own narrative discourse. Besides, stories can become the springboard for engaging thematic units which integrate the four macro-skills while enhancing students’ cognitive development.

7. Skills development

Mishan and Timmis (2015: 99) distinguish the concepts of skills and strategies. The authors define skills as automatic and unconscious actions that students carry out without being aware of the steps involved and strategies as conscious procedures aimed at making learning more effective and efficient. Although the former cannot be taught but developed, materials might be designed in order to offer opportunities for strategies to be practiced and automated so that they can latter become skills.

8. Use of a graded reader

Hill (2008: 185) defines graded readers as “books written for learners of English using limited lexis and syntax, the former determined by frequency and usefulness and the latter by simplicity. Most series increase the permitted lexis and syntax in stages from beginning to advanced, with each stage presenting a more demanding reading task, not only in language but also in length and format”. He adds that these types of stories were originally commercialized order to make literature accessible to foreign learners of English whose level of the language is not yet appropriate to read the original texts, as it is the case with my students. (Hill, 1997: 57)

Materials Developed to Teach Literature, History and Language (Part 1)

Most materials developed for Language Teaching aim at achieving communicative competence, which is needed to succeed in a globalised world. As a result, materials and resources often appear to be limited to “conduct transactions and perform occupational tasks in the world outside the classroom” (Pulverness, 1999: 33). This type of commercial global material flourishes in the market, offering what is considered to be useful language for communicative purposes.

Pulverness (1999, 2007) and Ferradas (2003) state that Literature has often been neglected in ELT due to the emphasis laid on this functional or “referential language” in coursebooks, i.e.: “language which communicates at one level” (McRae, 1991: 3, in Ferradas, 2003: 406). These practices seem to disregard the potential literature has to offer “representational language”, which McRae (1991:3) defines as language whose meaning engages the imagination and interpretation of the learner in order to be decoded, going beyond the referential level. (In Ferradas, 2003: 407). Widdowson (1997:116) highlights the importance of literature as it “develops in learners an awareness of how literature functions as discourse and so to give them some access to the means of interpretation” (In Ferradas, 2003: 407).

The main reason to design materials aimed at using literature to contribute to cultural awareness through content taught within a CLIL approach was the fact that ELT has enough materials aimed at teaching functional language, but it lacks resources which integrate language and content such as literature, history and culture.

Approach to developing the materials

The development of these materials has followed humanistic and social-constructivist approaches, as they both focus on the needs of the learner.

Williams and Burden (1997: 30) acknowledge that humanistic approaches emphasize the vitality of the inner world of the learner, placing thoughts, feelings and emotions at the centre of human development. The authors claim that all human beings have a “natural potential for learning”, i.e. learning will take place if the content involved is perceived to be of personal relevance, and if it requires active participation including both feelings and cognition. The authors add that personalisation and differentiation are crucial. The former encompasses the idea that every learning experience should help learners develop a sense of personal identity, whereas the latter implies that the individual learners’ needs should be identified and targeted. As Hamacheck (1977:149) describes it: “Humanistic education starts with the idea that students are different, and it strives to help students become more like themselves and less like each other” (in Williams and Burden, 1997: 36)

In addition, Williams and Burden (1997: 43) point out that, from a social interactionist point of view, children are immersed in a social world and learning takes place through interactions with other people. Thornbury claims that through those interactions teachers provide sources of input and feedback which are crucial for language acquisition to take place in the classroom (2006: 225). When interaction takes place, learning can be adjusted to the needs of the child in order to help him/her become more competent (Cameron, 2001: 8). This was defined by Bruner (1983, in Tomlinson, 2013: 183) as scaffolding, i.e. temporary interactional support given to learners while their language system is developing, in order to perform a task at a level that might be beyond their current competence.