How much do you give for love?
Twenty’s Century has been an important period within literature. Novels, short stories, poems and essays have marked this period in writing. British literature has a rich variety of authors and in this course we have studied the most important ones, such as Keats, Woolf, Dickens, Lawrence and Auden. We mainly worked on poems and throughout them, we discovered how rich British Literature is. There are several interesting topics and we had fascinating discussions thanks to them.
What called my attention was the delicate use of words in poems and the impact of them in people’s life. Last term I wrote about how to appreciate poetry and one of the most important things is assuming it as a way of expression. For that reason poetry is an interesting manner to bring literature inside our EFL classroom. As we saw in classes, poems are much shorter than novels and short stories. Hence, they can be read completely to understand them better. Furthermore, there are lots of topics inside of them as those ones seen in classes such as death, industrialization, desolation, loneliness, within others. But, from all the writers studied, I really liked Auden’s way of writing, because he showed extremely current; for instance society, oppression, loneliness, love and revenge.
Wystan Hugh Auden is an Anglo-American poet, who born in England and then he received the American nationality. His poems were mainly focus on society’s issues and treated with psychological point of view. Irony, psychology, lyric and consciousness were part of his style. After reading September 1, 1939 I was engaged with him. But, in this opportunity I have chosen another Auden’s poem calls “The More Loving One”
I personally believe that this poem is an excellent work to bring literature into the classroom. First of all, The More Loving One talks about devotion, indifference and love, even if you do not receive it in return. Second, we can highlight the idea of losing someone to make her/ him happy. When you love, you give everything even the idea of loosing all. Finally, it is short and it has a comprehensible language, that allows students to get the idea quickly.
After showing the advantages of The More Loving One by W.H, you need to know how to deal with it in an EFL classroom. Possibly, love is seen as a simple theme in our life and in some way it is. But, when we think that there are so many people in love and they do not receive it in return, this simplicity is not understood by these “thinkers”. So, you start to notice different bitter loving issues, not just the rose color side. Therefore, as you can see in this poem, there are a variety of topics to be seen in classes just by talking about love. For me, that is the marvellous characteristic of literature. It allows us to discuss, think, reflect, know, learn and select. Penny Ur suggests the idea of showing literature as window of knowing cultures, religions, beliefs, folklore and language itself.
One of the best approaches to bring literature in the classroom is the Reader-Centered Approach. Shortly, this approach emphasizes the individual as a reader responder. It argues that collaboration between authors, the reader is the best way to reach an appropriate understanding and use of literary texts. The main objective in this case of showing The More Loving One is to encourage interpretation, personal responses from the reader and applicability of students’ own contexts. As themes are not easy to talk about them, the activity is ideally for 11th graders.
As the objective of the reading is personal responses and applicability in own contexts. The teacher can promote book discussions by asking interpretation and application question. For example:
• Select the main topics of the poem. (In this case love, indifference, devotion)
• Relate the topics with your own life: Have you ever been in love? Have you ever suffered for love?
• What do you think about the writer’s opinion?
Also, we can work with oral interpretation and oral presentations. As my style of teaching is very dynamic and I like moving, dancing and I use lot of body language. I would like to see students working on reader’s theater, puppet thetaer and role plays. Students pick up one or two important and appealing topic from the poem and they create one of these possible representations. In these activities, it is important students’ creativity, voices, expressive language, gesture and a good development of the conflict. Learners need to use their understanding and interpretation of the literary text.
If the class is divided in groups and there are few students who do not want to make these presentations, they can analyze the poem and tell us what they understand from it. They can make questions about it for the rest of the class. They can write a short paper with their own experiences about love or write about what they think about one specific theme from the poem.
Having in mind all these activities from the Reader-Centered approach, bringing literature to the classroom should not be as complicated as it was some years ago. Even though most of the poems are short, it does not mean that they are easier to work with. Poets use very complex words. However, The More Loving One has a clear language and a clear narrator to be understood easier than others. But, we do not have to judge and work with the complexity or simplicity of the literary texts. We need to work with them, because they help students to understand their society better, specially with W.H Auden. He wrote about current issues, hence I chose him to work with my high-school students.
In short, during this term I have learned lots of techniques to bring literature to the classroom, not matters if the work is long or short. The most important issue is paying attention of our students. In other words, what they need, what appropriate for their ages is, what proficiency they have and what objectives I have from showing them literature. As a future English teacher, I must know that I am not just a teacher of one specific language. Moreover, the language is not grammar and syntax only. Language is culture and culture is in literature. Thus… Do you put literature away from your classes?
Bibliography
• Ur, Penny. A Course in Language Teaching. Part III: Teaching the Language. Cambrigde: Cambridge University Press. 2007
• Ur, Penny. Language Activities for Teenagers. Cambridge university Press. Cambridge. 2007
• Chi-Fen Emily Chen. Department of English, National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology. Children’s Literature. 15 Nov 2009.
• House, Random. Academy of American Poets. The More Loving One. 1960. 25 Nov 2009
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15550
