Professional development | Book Club class no.2 – WSI

Fruits of students' efforts in our second Book Club class.

Using a newspaper article about the London Underground or subterranean railway network to encourage ideas on how they could improve their own transport system the learners were asked to read and jot down suggestions, first alone, and then in groups. Some seemed not greatly interested in the task.

To be fair, we'd discussed the subway in a previous lesson, where learners read a collection of subway-themed poems (Goldfish, Mosquito, and Tow Logs) and walked around like passers-by themselves in 'subways' reading various billboards. In that lesson some good, meaningful discussion had come about. 

The lesson I had prepared was tasked-based. The aim of the lesson was 'to develop skills of reading for gist and oral fluency through task-based activities.' This was a Friday night and the learners were tired. But also there was a new mix of learners, some of whom hadn't been in the previous lesson.

This was not a lesson for slow discussion about book themes and plot, etc., but a skills lesson based on books as materials. Skills and language development are achievable within one  sixty-minute lesson.

  
The pictures above some ways to improve the city's transport system, a post-reading activity.

In Literature by Alan Duff and Alan Marly (Oxford University Press), the book from which I took this lesson's article on the London Underground, it states that literature is better used to stimulate language activities by 'engaging the students interactively with the text, with fellow students, and with the teacher,' favouring this over a study of literature per se (either from the literary critical or the stylistics viewpoint). 

Some other comments:

'[with this approach] The student is an active agent not a passive recipient.'

'The activities should offer ample opportunities for the students to contribute and share 

their own experiences, perceptions, and opinions.'

'The text should be allowed to suggest the type of activity. This means breaking away from  

the stereotypical format of text and questions.'

'Texts can be presented in a variety of ways. This may sometimes mean withholding the 

text until the end of an activity, cutting it up, using fragments of it only, and so on.'

But then what about real literature? The book comments further:

'[this approach] might be seen as failing to teach real literature and taking literature 'seriously', by which is generally meant a body of texts recognised as great literature [...] There is nothing sacred about a literary text. All such texts were at some time written down, rearranged, scratched out, torn up revised, misprinted, and so on. Anyone doubting this should simply look at any well-known writer's notebook or manuscript.'

'More importantly perhaps, if students are encouraged to adopt a 'hands on' approach to texts, they are likely to lose some of the awesome respect which the literary printed word inspires, and which gets in the way of the individual reader/interpreter's personal response to the text.'

Any practice is good practice, and it was still a good skills lesson.

In future I'll continue to find ways to energise the class and perhaps adapt materials.