Encouraging the Appreciation of Literature Through Personal Involvement
Danielle Frisch, Luxembourg
Born in 1981 in Luxembourg, studied English Literature at the University of Aberdeen, graduated in 2006, and started teaching English in Luxembourg that same year, teaches at the Lycée Technique Nic Biever in Dudelange, Luxembourg.
Email: danielle.frisch@education.lu
Menu
General introduction
The adolescent as reader
Exploring literature in class
Conclusion
Selected bibliography
The appreciation of literature is almost unanimously considered to be an important part of both language learning and a good education in general. Understanding and positioning oneself in relation to literature fosters personal development and “raises awareness of different human situations and conflicts.” (Ur, p.201) Exploring literature in class can both further critical, independent thinking and the expression of personal thoughts; skills of considerable importance for students’ personal development. Collie and Slater criticise the fact that the process of learning a language is very often “analytic, piecemeal, and, at the level of the personality, fairly superficial. (Collie, p.3) Reading and appreciating literature is a very personal and emotional process. Tackling literature in the classroom is an invaluable opportunity for working on “empathic, critical and creative thinking”. (Ur, p.201)
The following project was implemented at an upper-intermediate level and the text treated was The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. The underlying objective of the project was based on the belief that students who engage with a text, whose response to the text is respected and valued and who are encouraged to explore their own thoughts and feelings about it, will come to acknowledge the relevance of literature for their own lives. Very often, students struggle to find the answer or interpretation the teacher wants to hear, which leads them to “lose their connections with the book as well as their confidence as readers”. (Soter, p.3) Meyer describes this phenomenon quite appropriately:
„Fast alle Schüler haben im Verlauf ihrer Schülersozialisation eine fatale Einstellung entwickelt. Sie gehen davon aus, dass private Phantasien, Thesen und Arbeitsergebnisse erst dann „richtig“ und „relevant“ sind wenn sie vom Lehrer offiziell bestätigt worden sind. (…) das subjektive, vermeintlich weniger wertvolle Denken und Meinen des Schülers wird durch die Kodifizierung des Lehrers zum Schulwissen. Erst mit diesem Güte-Stempel ist es für viele Schüler akzeptabel, wahr, richtig und in späteren Klassenarbeiten verwertbar!“ (Meyer, p.164)
In order to counteract these tendencies, which undoubtedly spoil any personal involvement with the text, it is important to think about the learning environment and the teacher’s approach and role. The teacher becomes a facilitator of personal thought and expression, a prober and challenger and a non-judgemental encourager of creativity.
Adolescence is generally considered to be a turbulent time; characterised by the search for an independent identity and increased self-consciousness. At that point in life, people discover the “subjective self” and the uniqueness of subjective experience. (Appleyard, p.96) This discovery often goes hand in hand with moodiness and heightened emotional reactions.
Appleyard states that, for adolescents, one of the most important criteria for judging a book’s quality is whether it makes them think about themselves and the world. In this way, the exploration of literature can be linked to personal growth and development. Adolescents become aware of “their own feelings and judgements and the motives of other people’s actions.” They discover that “the whole intelligibility of the world is up for grabs and that they need to sort these things out and that reading helps.” (p. 116) Whereas younger readers usually judge stories according to their realism and tend to believe in them as accurate representations of the world, adolescents start to discern different points of view and ways of feeling and become aware of a need for evaluation. (p. 119) In Appleyard’s words: “The adolescent has become what the juvenile was not, an observer and evaluator of self and others, so it is an easy step from involvement in the story to reflecting about it.” (p. 101)
It is important to take into account that “reflecting about the story” is an essentially personalist phenomenon for adolescents. They start developing an awareness of their own thoughts and feelings while reading, and think about the storyline, the characters, their motives, and feelings solely in relation to their own personality. Their reactions to stories are usually characterised by “retellings, subjective evaluations, emphasis on feelings, and simple inferencing (all fairly elementary approaches to a text)”. (p. 114) Although readers at this stage talk about the meaning of a text, literary criticism, interpretation, and textual analysis are part of the next step of development and thus not part of an adolescent’s spontaneous approach.
This obviously has far-reaching consequences for the way a text should be dealt with in class. According to Appleyard, what adolescents most need are “tools to deal with the world of ideas and values as they have recently discovered it.” (p. 116) In order to provide students with these tools, a teacher has to carefully think about the way they approach the exploration of a text.
We have seen that an adolescent’s first response to a story is wholly personalist.
If we make students proceed directly from this way of responding to academic talk of literary devices, symbols, genres, ambiguity, point of view, and so forth, then we risking passing over the adolescent’s crucial involvement with the whole world of meaning and significance. We should be more afraid of introducing such matters, too early, than too late, especially when the voice of the teacher seems to be the voice of authority. (Appleyard, p.116)
The teacher’s stance thus plays an important role in helping students make the text their own. This will be almost impossible if he or she does not relinquish “the voice of authority”. Admitting that you do not have all the answers, both to questions about the text and about larger questions triggered by the text, leads students to pursue their own intuitions and develop their own thoughts. Literature can be spoiled by over-teaching. (Ur, p.202) Focusing only on comprehension or language will inhibit students’ thoughts just as imparting literary criticism will.
Appleyard distinguishes between “personalist” and “academic” approaches to literary education, and it is the teacher’s job to find the appropriate balance between the two, taking into account the curriculum and the need of the students. In this project, the “personalist approach” was favoured, due to the fact that the students had little experience of reading non-simplified fiction, or indeed with extensive reading at all. The goal was to tap into students’ affections, subconscious intuitions and subjectivity in order to encourage a personal response to the literary text.
Soter complains that “if the teacher hopes to do more to sharpen students’ own response to the literary work, there is often little guidance on how to do so”. (p. 8) Thus a further goal was to teach students methods, such as brainstorming from a keyword, free association or visualization which would provide them with the tools they need to make sense of a text on their own and in a way that is relevant to them. After this personal response has been established, scaffolding can be provided through a more “academic” approach. Showing the student how his or her response can be further explored through an analysis of the text, both reinforces this response and takes it further, accentuating and sophisticating it in the process.
“Extensive class discussions and substantive writing assignments” will help to develop “the problem-solving and critical-thinking skills students need to be able to read literature” and to respond to it in meaningful ways. (Appleyard, p.115) Much thinking is not about right or wrong answers and open questions allow students to come up with alternative and diverging ideas. For Cowley, open questions “are excellent for developing our students’ thinking skills as … they help to encourage the searching, comprehensive, imaginative, intuitive and individual side of our personalities. At their best, they encourage the children to respond with creativity and by using complex, higher-order thought processes.” (Cowley, p.16) Moreover, non-directivity ensures that students can take the lesson into their own hands and that they can come up with their own thoughts.
Furthermore, an “interpretation diary”, consisting of various written assignments, was used to help students establish their own representation of the story, its characters and the relationships between them. Writing is a great way of increasing awareness of one’s thoughts and of exploring them further. It allows students to make discoveries about themselves and to bring insights and feelings into consciousness. In this case, writing is used for personal reasons and does not focus on form or acceptability of structure. Rather, it is a means of grappling with one’s questions and a way of finding answers to them. Before the book was treated in class, students had to read it and to write two personal reactions to it, the first after having read half the book, the second after having finished it. Their ideas were then discussed in class. The diaries show that students react to literary devices (here narrative perspective) without being aware of them as literary devices. Their thoughts and particularly their criticisms touched a lot of important issues about the text, which were further explored at later stages. The fact that they had thought, written and talked about these issues, questions, and feelings prior to their treatment in class made them feel that they were in charge of their own approach to the text.
Apart from the more traditional discussion and writing assignments, other methods were used which aimed at engaging students. One of these methods is “sculpting”, an activity that involves creating a visual-spatial representation of a particular scene or topic with “student-statues”. One group of students arranges their peers, who represent specific characters, according to how they perceive their interrelationship. Space and body posture can be used to convey insights and ideas. The activity partly circumvents language and thus those students who do not readily participate in class discussions can express their ideas as well. Moreover, the whole class is engaged. The sculpture is later used as starting point for discussion; the “statues” can bring in their perceptions of their position, the “sculptors” can talk about their intentions and onlookers can comment on their impression of the whole scene. This activity is very memorable and the image created is very suggestive. Unfortunately, most classrooms are much too small for such an endeavour, so that the assembly hall or similar rooms have to be used.
In general, visual representations can help students get to grips with aspects of a literary work that they struggle with. In this case, many students had trouble understanding the relationship between the protagonists of the novel. First, students were asked to “think-pair-share” on the topic of love; to decide what love is for them and what its essential characteristics are. Having established and exchanged their ideas, the students were then invited to tackle the relationship in the novel. Playing around with colours and shapes can activate the creative spirit and trigger insights in ways different from discussions. The goal was to gain a deeper understanding of the protagonist’s interrelationship through tinkering and doodling in groups. For this purpose I brought a heap of handicraft materials along, such as cardboards and shapes in different colours. The aim was to discuss the relationship as presented in the novel and then create a visual representation of it. This task is non-directive, engaging and enjoyable. Students could use colours, shapes and quotes from the book to convey their ideas. Each group later presented their poster and the posters were compared in the plenary in order to draw conclusions.
As we have seen, adolescents do not think about or interpret a book in terms of textual analysis, symbols or narrative devices but solely in terms of their own subjectivity. Thus, activities aiming at textual analysis should be triggered by student questioning and start off with student input. Students often complain about descriptive passages, which they find superfluous. In The Virgin Suicides, many descriptive passages are deeply symbolic and developing an approach to these passages helped understanding some of the questions raised by students. Very often, such passages a very suggestive and trigger different associations. Exploring these personal associations can help students deal with these passages. The passage chosen was a rather lengthy description of a cemetery workers strike and students were encouraged to think-pair-share and come up with a mind map of associations around the topic “funeral”. First each student was asked to let his or her mind wander and write down all the things they associate with funerals. They then shared their associations with their group and drew spider grams linking the different ideas. These flipcharts were put on the board with magnets and we briefly discussed them. The groups were then asked to read the passage and to link it to their associations, before presenting their findings to the class. Depending on the directions their wandering minds had taken, they came up with slightly different interpretations of this scene. Their associations opened the scene up, and, since they brought in their own ideas, the interpretations they came up with were theirs, not the teacher’s. As homework, students were asked to choose a descriptive scene and to deal with it in the same way.
Students think about the world and try to make sense of it and reading and thinking about literature can help them in this. Adolescents need to “find a usable wisdom in the books they read and study” (Appleyard, p.118) When the teacher manages to make the literary text relevant to them by adapting to their level and outlook, reading and exploring literature becomes an enjoyable part of personal development and helps adolescents position themselves in relation to the world they live in. Encouraging students to bring in their subjectivity makes reading lessons rewarding to both learners and teacher and it might awaken their interest in English literature.
Appleyard, J.A. Becoming a Reader, The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Bamford, Julian and Richard R. Day, editors. Extensive Reading Activities for Teaching Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Campbell, Linda and Bruce and Dickinson, Dee. Teaching and Learning through Multiple Intelligences (New York: Pearson Education, 2004)
Collie, Joanne and Stephen Slater. Literature in the Language Classroom, A Resource Book of Ideas and Activities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Cowley, Sue. Getting the Buggers to Think (London: Continuum, 2007)
Harmer, Jeremy. How to Teach English, New Edition (Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2007)
Meyer, Hilbert. Unterrichtsmethoden II: Praxisband (Berlin: Cornelsen, 1987)
Reich, Kersten. Konstruktivistische Didaktik (Weinheim und Basel: Beltz, 2006)
Soter, Anna O. Young Adult Literature and the New Literary Theories (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999)
Ur, Penny. A Course in Language Teaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
The Literature course can be viewed here
The Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course can be viewed here
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