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[rickinbeijing]

I'd like to discuss what I consider to be an essential element in any comprehensive secondary EFL program: authentic literature. Hong Kong professor David Nunan (1989) defines authentic literature as "any material which has not been specifically produced for the purposes of language teaching."

I have taught Amy Tan's short story, "Two Kinds" (also a chapter in her best-selling novel The Joy Luck Club) with moderate success to both first year and third year key senior middle school students, also adapting it as a one-act play and a series of duets. Since then I have also used poems by Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, again with moderate success.

Not surprisingly, I found that these students had little understanding of literary analysis, partly because they had only read abridged and/or adapted literature (or graded readers) before in their English classes and partly because they had little practice in reader response in their Chinese language classes.

What is your take on this issue?

1. Do you agree that authentic literature is essential to a comprehensive secondary EFL curriculum or merely desirable? If you find it necessary, what does it offer the L2 learner that other materials cannot?

2. What kind of experiences have you had with authentic literature, good or bad?

[ChinaMovieMagic]

DVD movie segments w/printed materials...are the core of my approach. The learners can:
*See and Remember the Visual Input
*Say what they can about what they see
*Hear me describe in various ways the scene
*Respond to my TPR of the scene
*Work w/partners, doing "Say+Do" and/or "Do+Say"
*Do Role Play/Imagination
*Compare movie reviews at www.metacritic.com/www.imdb.com
*Study scripts at www.script-o-rama.com

More described at China Job-Related "Promoting Change..." thread

Key elements:
* Intrinsic Motivation
* Free Voluntary Reading (Krashen)

[travelingirl68]

Hello Rick...

Last year I had a lot of success with a combination of movies and authentic literature. One example was with the movie "Dead Poets Society". The mixture of the movie and then a review of the poetry referred to in the movie was very successful. It was interesting to see some of the students really start to think of their own lives in a new light while exploring the poetry.

Another example was with the use of comparison between literature and adapted scripts for individual projects with advanced students. The only thing I had available to me in both forms at my university was "Sense and Sensibility", but it too prompted a great deal of interesting analysis.

I believe that it takes more than just "authentic material" - some of my students were reading "A Farewell to Arms" with their local teacher, but they were not analyzing the text in a literary sense, just doing grammar and vocabulary studies through it... Studying authentic literature IMHO is a great way to study language, but it can be very difficult at times without the shared cultural background for students to understand the key points of stories, etc. I would love to hear what other experiences have been had by FT's!

[Roger]

In my foreign language classes literature was an important part of them. Latin makes no sense unless you read classic works.
Reading is supposed to improve imagination; don't know whether this is true, but our students could certainly do well with a little more stimulation to their brains.

I find that our students would learn better English if they were made to read novels, newspaper articles, essays in a foreign tongue (English)_. Instead of sleepily absorbing a teacher's list of new vocabs they could identify new words in a text and study them on their own or in class. Besides, thoughtful exposure to grammatically correct text English would enhance their own English production as sentence patterns would sink in.
Last but not least, they would get a far better understanding of the world beyond China. This would be a sort of acculturation that's sorely missing from our theoretically-profient English learners.

[travelingirl68]

Now now Roger, it does not have to be JUST the classics that promote an understanding of Latin! Gaudiamus igitur, iuvenes dum sumus... I will never forget the first line I ever read in Latin: "Brittania est insula."

I agree with your points, and I would think that it also helps students improve their writing skills as well as learn to pick up the meaning of words contextually - just as it does for native speakers.

IMHO, the readers that some students get are horrible - the simplified versions of Mark Twain, etc. seem to slaughter the stories and the lyrical qualities of the authors. I think it would be better to find stories, poems, etc. that are simpler in form than change a text and "dumb it down" for lower level learners. I am sure there will be plenty of people who will disagree with me and I would love to hear the plus side of using such texts from others.

[ChinaMovieMagic]

travelingirl68 USED dEAD pOETS sOCIETY/DPS! Me too! Using it now in the Screening Room. The class teacher got a little nervous during the scene where Williams tells the kids to rup out the pedantic/academic UNTRO in their poetry books.

The students can also reaf evaluations written by ordinary folks who saw the movie ... at www.imdb.com
The fact that many of the same words/udeas are used regularly by the different "laubaixin" reviewers, over many years of Postings:
*accurately reflects limited vocabulary as well as, possibly,mass mindedness smong supported of a movie about an iconoclast
*facilitates understanding by our students.

The Internet has huge resources on DPS...with lesson plans/Exercises/Charts for Visual Memory testing...
...the Movie is marked as one of the Landmarks in the History of Education by a U. of Ottawa project
..it's also criticized as being uncreative/predictable/stereotypical/Hollywoodized...


Promoting Critical Thinking is important for China's future...AND...it can easily be combined w/movie segment/Movie Reviews

More on "Promoting Change..." thread here in "China Job"...THE dps SECTIONS are on pg 7 or 8 or so...

For DPS materials I've downloaded from Untermet, EMail me & I'll send an attachment when I get home from YangShuo...
YS is a great place...all sorts of possibilities w/the Buckland Group

[rickinbeijing]

Certainly the reading of authentic literature can promote critical thinking skills in China. But then considering what most of the graduates of East Coast American colleges post on this forum, one cannot assume such will be the case.

[rickinbeijing]

To travelinggirl68 and others:

If you happen to try reading Amy Tan's short story "Two Kinds" with senior middle school students in the remaining weeks of this semester, I would appreciate it if you would post your experiences on this thread or send me a PM.

For those of you who may not know, this story was first published in a literary magazine before reappearing as a chapter in Tan's blockbuster novel The Joy Luck Club and then again as a scene in the film by the same title.

It clearly delineates both the cultural and generational gap between China-born and raised mothers and their American born and raised daughters. Set in San Francisco's Chinatown in the postwar period, the story centers on Suyuan's insistence that her daughter June learn to play the piano despite the latter's lackluster performance and interest.

The one challenging aspect for teachers is the Chinglish used by the mothers, but this can be instructive grammatically and an opportunity to evoke a humorous response from students. Another potential challenge are several references to American popular culture (e.g. The Monkees) of the period.

My students found it compelling for it focused on a problem many of them had with their own parents. The story gave voice, as it were, to their resentment but in a reflective stance.

It also worked well as a read-aloud when I adapted it as a one-act play (with reference to the screenplay by Tan and Ronald Bass). If you'd like a copy of the one-act play (which has a controlled vocabulary), please PM me.

As a sidenote: when I showed my students (and others at two universities) the film The Joy Luck Club, they were (at least outwardly) more affected by it than any other film we viewed.

[Roger]

We have discussed the merits of teaching literature in this forum a number of times, and the general consensus has been that teaching literature is a major, jaor difficult challenge. But it also is difficult to teach literature to kids in a school anywhere in the West.
I say once again that literature should be taught.
And I say again why this should hapen.

First, kids should develop their own curiosity about the English-speaking world and the language that transports such images and stories and cultural features. The CHinese idea that you can "translate" every thought into their first tongue is a self-limiting one. What you see through the prism of your own glasses (language)( is distorte.
Second, reading enhances a learner's feel for the language. Our students badly need to develop their intuition. Their "academic" and bookish learning is unwholesome, and we can see how dysfunctional most of them are due to this learning style.

Third: students can learn much more on their own through reading than they can ever do by memorising what their teachers order them to memorise. When a student repeatedly fails tro remember the exact meaning of a given word in a given context he will grow tired of looking it up in a bilingual dictionary; then there are two options: either he gives up, or he starts using his imagination and guesses at the meaning. We would all love for our students to do the latter, wouldn't we?

I taught English Literature in a college and had some truly mind-numbing experiences, yet I also found encouraging signs of intellectual awakening. My greatest satisfaction came when I used a video based on the once nationally popular FAMILY ALBUM U.S.A.
My students were all glued to that video and they studied the book that came with it with renewed energy. It was a English-only medium. While I understand the disagrement some have with me over the usefulness of FAMILY ALBUM U.S.A. I have to say my experience shows you can in fact enthrall Chinese with a story set in a western environment, and you can make them think about the differences between what they believe to know, and those they actually see with their own eyes.
That video and book do nothing short of turning their preconceived notions about America upside down.

[rickinbeijing]

Thank you for a very fine and thoughtful response to my query and (hold your breath) I agree with everything you said to boot.

One of the biggest obstacles, I believe, to making curricular inroads with authentic literature in secondary schools here is that many of the reasons FT's cite for why it should be taught involve affective (as opposed to cognitive) benefits. This strikes some Chinese administrators--if not most--as impractical and unrelated to study for the college entrance exams.

Yet your most recent post, Roger, reconfirms that indeed there are cognitive advantages to reading authentic literature. I'm afraid, however, and I think you will agree, that all too many school administrators have precious little understanding of the L2 acquisition process, especially given that few are themselves bilingual.

A further question for you, though: you said teaching authentic literature is a "major difficult challenge." What makes it so, in your opinion?

As to the "Family Album, USA" I've seen it in larger Chinese bookstores although it has fallen out of use, perhaps because it was written in the 1980's. Nonetheless, I suspect that at least two things accounted for its popularity over the years: 1) it was personal, a microcosm of the society that was more easy for students uninitiated in the culture to grasp, and 2) it was told as a narrative.

The power of narrative (or story-telling, if you prefer) cannot be underestimated. We know oral tradition is based on it and we know, too, that as you mentioned, it provides a meaningful context for making language part of long-term memory.

[Roger]

[anthyp]

Well, one thing we have to consider here is that I do not think most of us are trained in the teaching of authentic literature ... which might explain why more posters don't use it in their classes (they don't know how to use it).

I am not trained, either, but I am currently using it in these small, private lessons I have with some of my students, during which we mostly focus on pronunciation. I give them a different poem to memorize each week, usually Yeats, and tell them not to worry too much about what it means. Only to get it in their brains by the end of the week.

I made them tapes of my own recitations of the poems so they have something to mimic as they practice. I want to focus on my main reason for using poetry in these lessons -- and that's not to teach them about English literature or enlighten them or anything like that. Really I just think that reciting poetry, with its fluid rhythm and consonantal alliteration and things like that, and especially by mimicking my voice, may help fine - tune their pronunciation a bit.

Whew, that was a convoluted sentence. Anyway, we are still in the early stages of this experiment so I'm not sure if it's working yet. They enjoy the poems, which are very easy by the way even for L2 students, so that's a start. At first, I had to wean them off the Crazy English approach to reciting Yeats
Whenyouareoldandgrayandfullofsleep
but we're humming along much better now.

By the way, I think that you have to have a clear purpose for using authetic literature in the EFL classroom -- so not just because you enjoy it, but going in there with a clear idea of how it can supplement your teaching, as in poetry for pronunciation, or short stories for grammar / vocabulary / reading, etc.

[jr1965]

I think that Anthyp asks a good question, i.e., what is the purpose of using lit in the classroom (especially in an EFL setting)? Check out this link on itesl.org about the role of extensive reading in the language-learning classroom.

http://iteslj.org/Articles/Bell-Reading.html

[Roger]

In my first post I was talking about reading from the point of view of the language teacher who realises that his students do not pick up the structures of English from their classroom activities and textbooks; making them read in their spare time (homework) affords them the opportunity to internalise English structures in their own speed.
But, of course, teaching literature has a different objective: to familiarise students with the culture of the English speakers. Part of this culture is how westerners think. And that is not easy to teach as learning to think is requires intuition.
Students need to learn to identify a variety of elements that combine to form written or oral communication; for example the MOODS of characters in a text can only be inferred from the context and from circumstantial hints contained in the writing, whereas in oral communications the timbre of the voices of speakers and body language help students understand underlying meanings. Such things tend to get lost in translations.
For me, however, another reason why students ought to take literature is this: those who find reading to be a valuable pastime will spend more time on English. It is, in other words, the students' best friend that keeps them interested in English and helps them widen their own English horizon. A student who reads ever more difficult texts will learn how to teach himself and become self-reliant. The need for translation will become obsolete.
There are many formidable obstacles on Chinese students' paths towards an interest in literature: I note that Chinese students don't even read much in Chinese (at least here in Guangdong), and part of the problem may be that literacy in Chinese is almost never total.

[ChinaMovieMagic]

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