How do you teach teenagers to read and understand a literary work? Francis Gilbert argues that it is important for students to ‘zoom in and out’ of the text to develop understanding.
Confession time: I’m going to put my hands up and say that quite a number of my students did not read all of the literary texts they studied with me in their English lessons. Yet, did very well in their exams. There, the truth is out! But, was my teaching effective? Did the students learn a lot? I would argue that they did. Let me illustrate with a story of my different attempts at teaching Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd to 14-16 year olds.
I love this romantic, pastoral love story. Hardy evokes the dramatic tale of Bathsheba Everdene’s quest to find meaning in work and love in a Victorian, male-dominated world. But sadly, many of my students did not share my feelings. When I first started teaching in the early 2000s, the book was a set text for an externally assessed long literature examination. Students were given a grade, A*-G. Often, anything less than C grade was considered a “fail”, even though any grade was technically a pass. The grade was very important to students, it would be recorded on their official school records and be given to prospective universities and employers.
My approach to begin with was to get the student to read the whole text. They would commence with reading Chapter 1. Then, through a mixture of setting homework and reading the text in class, ‘plough’ through the rest of the book. This was how I read texts at school and at university. However, there were lively characters in my mixed-ability class. These characters did not diligently read whatever was put in front of them and they soon became restless. Hardy’s brilliantly descriptive but dense prose did not connect with my teenagers. I soon had constant low-level disruption: chattering, calling out and inattention to the work. The brutal truth was that the majority of the students were learning very little, while two clever acolytes had read on and finished the book! My teaching was pleasing no one.
I changed tack and decided to “zoom out” of the text, and give all students an overview of its events. Using objects such as plastic men, women and sheep, a toy farm and a wooden sword. With the help of the two Hardy ‘fans’, I told the story, the whole story, in a dramatic way, to the class in a circle. As I told the story, the students held and passed around the plastic Gabriel Oak, Bathsheba and Sergeant Troy. The story was literally at their fingertips.
Suddenly, all of the students were interested. This is unsurprising because the story is fantastic, with lots of twists and turns. I then asked the students to retell the story using objects of their own. Students then wrote summaries of the story in the book, indicating where the suspenseful parts were. Within a lesson, my students had “zoomed out” of the whole book. This allowed them to get a picture of it, like spacecraft gets a picture of the earth.
I then showed them the film, which is very effective. I stopped the film at key points and asked the students to compare a key passage in the book with the film’s representation of it. Students devised charts comparing the similarities and differences between the film and prose. At this point, I would use the analogy of us being like a spacecraft zooming into earth. The spacecraft lands in a particular place to investigate Hardy’s prose. Once the students had established a firm grasp of the story, they were able to read important extracts in pairs and groups.
All of the students did far better than expected in their final exam. Most of them ended the course feeling a genuine sense of affection for Hardy. So, I would heartily encourage teachers to read whole texts with students. However, I believe my experiences taught me that the focus should be on assessing students’ genuine abilities, making reading enjoyable and nurturing independent reading skills.