Using Freewriting to Make Sense of Literature
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For a 2015 workshop with pre- and in-service secondary school English teachers in New Delhi, we asked our colleagues to bring a short text from their curriculum to anchor the day’s activities. They arrived with a copy of Stephen Spender’s poem “An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum”; the fourth and final stanza reads as follows:
Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor,
This map becomes their window and these windows
That shut upon their lives like catacombs,
Break O break open ’till they break the town
And show the children green fields and make their world
Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues
Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open
History is theirs whose language is the sun. (Stephen Spender Trust 2015)
The text, the teachers explained, was required reading for twelfth-graders (senior secondary) and, for their students and for themselves, a struggle. Part of the challenge for teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) working with a literature-based curriculum is striking a balance between teaching the text or series of texts and creating opportunities for communicative interaction. To begin with, a poem such as Spender’s is hard to read. The syntax is unconventional—e.g., “History is theirs whose language is the sun”; so too is theimagery Spender employs—e.g., “… and let their tongues/Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open.” Often, students simply want to know what the poem means—or is supposed to mean. Obligingly, teachers explain line by line, stanza by stanza, with a culminating series of comprehension questions, frequently in a multiple-choice format. If students still do not “get it,” they turn to the Internet in search of an explanation; and, in the case of the Spender poem, a recent Google search for “An elementary school classroom in a slum analysis” rendered 13,400 results. We argue, however, that in a communicative teaching paradigm, it is not enough to teach what the teacher believes the poem to mean—or what someone told us it means. Rather, reading complex texts is an opportunity for students to engage in deeply personal meaning-making processes.
Author:
Spencer Salas; Kyra Garson; Shweta Khanna; and Beth Murray
Downloadable Resources
| File | Format | Size | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
| etf_54_2_pg12-19.pdf | 169.28kb | Download |
English Teaching Forum 2016, Volume 54, Number 2
What is a mind map? How can you use concept mind mapping, collaborative mapping, and human mind mapping in your classroom? Find out in the latest issue of English Teaching Forum.