Teachers' Day 2010

Literature in the classroom: New texts, new trends

In spite of all the recent mania for standardization and output-orientation there seems to be renewed interest in literature as an aesthetic medium – a medium which notoriously eludes utilitarian approaches to EFL teaching. Instead of fitting neatly into established frameworks of competences, literature can inspire students into more creative and unconventional thinking. In this presentation I will make a plea for fostering such learning by using literature in the classroom. Specifically, I will introduce my audience to less frequently used literary genres, sometimes called ‘multimodal’ genres, such as comics, shape poems and pop songs. This will include discussing a wide range of student-centered activities.

Fictional texts in the classroom

This workshop will concentrate on using fictional texts in the classroom with elementary to intermediate learners. The main emphasis will be on how pupils read, respond and react to fictional texts. Participants will try out pre- while and post reading tasks themselves using learning strategies which are communicative and cooperative.

Teaching literature – Teaching film

Today film analysis has found its way into the classroom. It aims at encouraging young people to learn by viewing and to be critical consumers of what they see. As films are ever present in our daily lives, the cinema, video, on television or the internet, the ability to appreciate and analyse films is an empowering skill which has become increasingly important for young people. In order to fully appreciate, analyse and criticise films it is necessary to gain an understanding of how a film is constructed.
The understanding of film on the level of sequence, scene and whole text and the appropriate critical vocabulary is considered to be an important part of literacy in its broader sense.
In order to enable students to arrive at a fuller understanding of what they see on screen, they will need to learn how to read a moving image text. A film tells its story with its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax: The director or screen writer may express a narrative by camera movement, camera position, sound etc.
This workshop will have a look at different aspects of film analysis and its usage in the classroom.

Songs from down under: Teaching Australia through pop songs

Why Australia? Australia is more than didgeridoos and kangaroos – nevertheless these stereotypes make Australia an exotic and therefore motivating topic for students.
Why pop songs? Pop songs are an important part of everyday-life, especially for students. The relevance to the lives of students should be an important pre-condition for today`s lessons.
So why not combining these two topics?
The workshop will offer a range of more or less well-known songs from, or about, Australia, its society and history. Based on the songs the subsequent exercises should address both Sek I– and Sek II– teachers.

Poetry in the EFL classroom: Challenge or reward? A rewarding challenge!

The basic aim of this workshop is to outline an approach which – hopefully – helps pupils and teachers overcome the widespread reluctance in dealing with poetry.

The participants will try out various methods that activate all the learners while allowing them to express their individual understanding of a poem.

Shakespeare in action

We all love Shakespeare’s plays but our students may think that they are stuffy, intellectual, inaccessible works of high art. This workshop is designed to give teachers the tools to show their students that the plays are, on the contrary, living, breathing, exciting, energetic and moving works of action. Even if you don’t want to do drama activities with your class come for your own personal development. This drama led workshop could add new dimensions to your personality and communicative abilities! No previous experience of drama is necessary. Just a sense of humour, a love of life and a willingness to compliment your own good practice in a fun and dramatic way! You will leave feeling fired up and full of energetic enthusiasm – even if you didn’t enter that way!

A raid on the articulate: using film to illuminate literature

The ‘film of the book’ is an appealing source of motivation in the literature classroom, but unless teachers and students are able to view such films in their own terms, they will always be viewed as inferior products based on literary texts, which by definition have greater merit. Using examples from a range of texts, this talk will examine the often troubled relationship between novel and film adaptation, briefly surveying theories of adaptation and looking at some of the inherent problems in ‘screening the novel’, to suggest more equivalent ways of ‘reading’ both source text and adaptation.

Screening a novel / Reading a film

In this workshop we will look in detail at what happens to a novel in the process of adaptation for the cinema. We will consider what is gained as well as what is lost, what can be augmented as well as what must be sacrificed, what can be expanded as well as what must be condensed. The session will focus on Metin Hüseyin’s 2002 film adaptation of a Meera Syal’s semi-autobiographical novel Anita and Me (1996), a coming-of-age tale of a child growing up as the daughter of the only Asian family in a 1970s Midlands mining village. (No previous knowledge of the book or the film will be assumed.)