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Teaching Tips: Teaching Literature

How do you make your students realize the great benefits reading literature offers? How do you make them see the beauty of the written word? How do you make them realize that Shakespeare is not just a dead, boring writer with a penchant for dillydallying and complicating things?

Here are some tips you can use to perk up your students’ interest and liking for literature:

  • Let them create their own.

Help your students to discover the writer or poet in them. Be it a simple poem, an essay or a short story, this exercise will allow you a glimpse on their interest as well as their creativity. Compliment and encourage them, most of all, guide them in improving their work.

  • Create a mini library in your classroom.

Sometimes, the only thing that prevents your students from developing a real love for literature is the lack of materials available. Try bringing in books from your own personal collection to give your students something to read and enjoy.

  • Have storytelling sessions.

Try to conduct story-telling sessions. The fun and relaxed atmosphere of story-telling sessions would make literature a less foreboding subject for your students.

  • Introduce variety.

Assign books or materials that have different style, plots, genre and authors. For this month for example, you can assign them a serious book like F. Sionil Jose’s The Pretenders, and then a humorous one like Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. This will lessen the chance of your students getting bored with reading literature.

  • Give them freedom of choice.

Every once in a while, let them choose what book they want to read instead of always assigning them materials to analyze or write a report about. Literature, aside from being educational, is also supposed to be entertaining.

  • Use technology.

Technology is something your students are familiar with and comfortable using. Create PowerPoint presentations introducing a piece of work and its author before asking your students to read them to stir their interest.

SOURCES:

Literature Teaching Tips, http://www.teach-nology.com/ideas/subjects/literature/
Stoyle, Paula, “Storytelling - benefits and tips.”
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/literature/storytelling.shtml