As a future English teacher I have being constantly wondering how we can teach our students the value of reading, as well as how they can understand the role that it plays in their lives. Besides, I have to recognize that through this year I have been trying to find the answer to explain my students the intimate connection between literature and life. However, what this literature course has been teaching me is that life provides the raw material on which literature imposes an artistic form and that its use can also be a powerful pedagogic tool. Literature to me is the communication of the writer's experience of life, but this connection between literature and life is not as simple as it seems. It has always been open to polemics among the great and noted critics of the world. Moreover, both reality and imagination play their role in great literature. Thus, literature is not merely a photographic copy of real life, nor is it a complete denial of life.
As an internship student I have been realizing that students do not like to read nor enjoy such process and most of them share the same idea about what literature means to them. The typical answer I got from them was that they do not understand what they read, because they were not motivated to read while being children, as well as they did not have the habit of reading. I strongly believe that in order to face this situation with our students, we as teachers need to teach them the value of literature by telling them that literature is part of our cultural heritage which is freely available to everyone, and which can enrich our lives in all kinds of ways. Hence, once we have broken the barriers that make studying literature seem daunting, we find that literary works can be entertaining, beautiful, funny, or tragic. We can also teach to our students, that through literature they can convey profundity of thought, richness of emotion, and insight into character. Literature takes us beyond our limited experience of life to show us the lives of other people at other times. Pieces of literature stir us intellectually and emotionally, and deepen our understanding of our history, our society, and our own individual lives.
In the following lines of this essay I will present some ways to make literature more interesting to our students by using the novel Oliver Twist written by Charles Dickens. Besides, I will provide some ideas to apply it inside the classroom.
I strongly believe that what we can teach to our students about literature is that we can gain a lot from it in many ways, but the most rewarding experiences can come in those moments when we feel the author has communicated something personally to us, one individual to another. Such moments can help validate our personal experience at a depth which is rarely reached by everyday life or the mass media. At some level, whether we believe in pleasure , politics or philosophy as the goal of reading, all of us who study literature believe that it is important not only in education but in life.
Regardless of the difficulties the practitioner can encounter, using literature is motivating to students. They are exposed to different themes which as rule curricular textbooks do not include. In addition, novels like Oliver Twist can be helpful to educate the whole person by examining the values that the story presents us therefore, we as teachers can encourage learners to develop attitudes towards them. It is important to observe that most of the values and attitudes that we can encounter, students can relate them to the world outside the classroom. And last but not least, literature broadens the sense of language as more than just for practical use, it encourages interaction. Literary texts can be effectively mined for discussions and sharing feelings or opinions.
As I mentioned before, literature as a tool in the EFL classroom is a viable option. A well thought selection of literary texts, such as Oliver Twist can help educators to create inside the classroom groups discussions based on students reading and the different approaches of understanding of the novel. Group discussions are fun and magic for students, because they have the power to transform our students from passive, rather shy, reticent students into students who eagerly point at their texts in order to support their arguments while sharing their opinions in English.
Using Dickens’s Oliver Twist we as teachers can introduce students to the novel by making them research and report on the social context of Victorian society and through the identification of social problems in our contemporary society make them relate both realities. As a second step of this activity, teachers can create group of students in which they can collaboratively research Dickens’s life, his concerns, his style of writing, his plot construction, etc. Other collaborative groups can research about the social context of the Victorian period, for instance about women's rights, education, the prison system, and social classes. After doing all that research process group discussions can start, even if they have not read a single page of the book. In the last step of this activity each group of students prepares a multimedia presentation for the class. As students read the novel, presentations are held at appropriate points. For example, students researching the prison system make their presentation early on, when Dickens portrays the first convict as a dehumanized animal. The teacher and the class can evaluate presentations using a mutually devised rubric, combining measures for depth and breadth of content as well as quality of presentation.
To conclude, I believe that since school teachers start to use group discussions of the books they read, the process of reading can be more fun and challenging, because such process is going to be share with their classmates and guided by the teacher and they are not going to be reading by their own, alone with their thoughts. It is amazing to observe how students really enjoy to share their experiences, so we have to take advantage of what they really like in order to make them feel part of the class, as if it they were constructing the course. In a nutshell, we as English teacher in foreign context can promote the language by opening student’s minds and making them to express their feelings and the emotions that they can get from a novel, though such amazing opportunities, educators and learners can create new waves of thought and calm the idle minds of this generation of students.
Works Cited
Brumfit,C.J. and R. Carter. Literature and Language Teaching. 1994, Oxford University Press.
David H. Jonassen. Evaluating Constructivist Learning. University of Colorado.
W.F. Collier. History of English Literature. Thomas Nelson & Sons. New York.
