Thinking Activity : Teaching English Language through Literature

 Hello readers !

                  Welcome to my blog. We all know that Literature is generally used in English Language Teaching (ELT) for the development of knowledge about the language. It helps the learners to get familiar with the socio-political backgrounds of target language society and also makes them understand how communication takes place in a particular community.  So, this blog is my thinking activity task which is assigned by our professor Dr. Dilip Barad. In this task we have to discuss about this perticular points like,

1. What sort of activities or tasks can be designed to teach language using a 'Novel' or 'short story'.
2. What sort of activities or tasks can be designed to teach language using  a 'poem'.
3. What sort of activities or tasks can be designed to teach language using a 'Play'.
4. What sort of activities or tasks can be designed to teach language using  a 'Film or videos'.

💠What sort of activities or tasks can be designed to teach language using a 'poem'.

                          Students read the poem and underline any words connected with the lexical grouping or cluster they discussed before reading the poem. Are there any other words in the poem which seem connected with this grouping? What metaphorical or symbolic meaning do these words seem to rake on in the poem? (In some poems, you may find a few different clusters or groupings which often function contrastively.)

b) Divide students into two groups. One group will be given the first verse of the poem from which most figurative uses of language are removed, the other the same verse from which most literal ones have been taken out.3

c) In some poems a grouping or cluster of words are linked together associatively and come to take on a metaphorical or figurative meaning in the poem. Before they read the poem ask students to write down any associations they have for this grouping. Does this cluster take on any particular symbolic meaning in the poem?

d) Students from the one group then discuss with students from the other how they completed the cloze exercise. What do they think of the original version of the poem? What two things are being compared? What is the effect of this comparison?

Using poetry with lower levels :

In the previous sections, we have thought mainly about some of the more distinctive features of poetry, and the problems they could present for our learners. In the rest of this chapter we turn our attention to some of the practical tasks and activities we can use to exploit poems in the classroom. In this section we look at some ways in which poetry can be used with students at elementary and low-intermediate level.