How can you use authentic texts to get your students learning while expressing themselves creatively? Interactive author Samantha Lewis offers some suggestions.
Spring always sees many opportunities to focus on literature and books in class with World Book Day, Shakespeare’s birthday and World Poetry Day. However, any time of year is a great time to integrate authentic literature into our classes, the more creatively the better. Here are a few ideas for getting creative with authentic texts.
Poems
My young teenage learners celebrated World Book Day by rapping Levi Tafari’s “Reach for the Stars”, a fantastic poem all about books. (You can read it here.) After reading and listening to the poem, we split it up and each pair of students memorised a verse. We adapted the poem by adding the “chorus” between each verse “Books are cool, books are fun, books should be read by everyone”.
Memorising just one verse and the chorus made the task more manageable for students and collaborative as they had to work together as a class to perform it. Then, in one of my attempts to encourage learners to use both sides of their brain at the same time, they added the rhythm of the “cup song” each time they said the chorus (the one from Pitch Perfect’s “When I’m gone” which took the teen world by storm). Here’s a recording of their performance:
They performed it to another class as part of a flashmob activity our school held to celebrate World Book Day. Poetry is a great way of helping learners with pronunciation, particularly rhythm and rhyme. Another poem my learners have successfully memorised and rapped is Tony Mitton’s “I wanna be a star” which focuses on jobs and celebrities.
As it’s a fairly simple poem, I decided to challenge my A2 students by ‘dictoglossing’ the poem. I have to admit this was the first time I tried out dictogloss with poetry, but as the structure is repetitive and predictable, it worked well. This time learners memorised the whole poem and wrote their own verse. This poem is part of the British Council BritLit project, which is well worth checking out. There are lots of authentic poems and short stories that can be used by young learners and teens.
Short stories
Two short stories I have used successfully in class with my B1 teens are “Ex Poser” and “Pink Bow Tie”, both written by children’s author Paul Jennings. You can also find them on the British Council LearnEnglish Teens site. Authentic short stories have the advantage of being short in length, but they often include unknown vocabulary. However, before reading both stories we carried out a peer-teaching vocabulary task to prepare students for the new lexis. I split the key vocabulary into three groups, each group checked the meaning of their words. Then they regrouped and taught their new words to their peers. Also, before reading they were given a set of questions about the story to answer e.g. There’s a boy sitting outside the headmaster’s office. Why is he there? etc. In this way, they effectively created their own story before reading the actual story, which generated a lot of language and interest.
They particularly enjoyed the quirkiness of “Pink Bow Tie” and adapted the story into a short play which became their end-of-year show. They kept the dialogue simple, using language they understood and could remember so they could focus on acting. They enjoyed designing the costumes and creating the visual effects such as when the characters suddenly become younger or older.
Books in L1
It can also be useful to exploit learners’ knowledge of authentic texts in their own language. The other day we started talking about books in my class of 11 year-olds. All of a sudden they were interrupting each other and fighting to be heard to tell each other about a book they had read in Spanish. Not only was I pleasantly surprised to hear them talking so passionately in English about books, but it generated a lot of language outside that of a typical coursebook syllabus. Keen to channel such enthusiasm, I took the opportunity in the next class to set up a book review writing activity, using the online collaborative tool Padlet. Each student planned their book review before writing it on the online wall and included a picture of the book cover. Then, they were able to read each others’ reviews and find out about new stories they might like to read.
Many thanks to Levi Tafari for granting us permission to use his poem in this blog post.