Well, look no further: we have the answer for you!

In this post, I’m going to share my 5 favourite classroom activities to teach literature in the English as a Foreign Language Classroom. The activities are well-suited for secondary school students, though some may be applicable for younger and/or older students depending on levels.

Where do these activities come from?

All the activities come from our 5/5 rated course Teaching Literature in the Language Classroom.

This interactive, guided course is based on an extensive review of the available research on teaching literature in English as an L2 contexts. It offers a framework for designing activities and lessons, and plenty of practical examples for how to teach different genres (e.g. drama, poetry, novels) in multimodal, engaging ways and in line with the relevant CEFR descriptors.

Activity 1: Book covers

As you know, one key aspect of teaching literature is stimulating the learners’ interest before starting to work on an author or piece of literature. One simple and effective way of doing this is through book covers.

Canonical literary texts often come in different versions and different book covers. Show your learners the different book covers of a book and ask them to speculate on its plot or themes based only on the title and pictures. This can easily be accomplished via Google Images: see this example with Harper Lee’s To kill a mockingbird.

Variation/expansion: show the book covers in the different languages the book has been translated in (possibly the students’ L1 and other foreign languages they study or use).

Activity 2: Walkabouts

When introducing different works by the same author, a good lead-in activity may be a walkabout.

In a walkabout, the teacher prints different texts by the same author and sticks them up around the classroom walls. Students walk around and read the texts. They decide which one they like best and stand next to it. This is best accomplished with short texts such as poems.

Variation for online teaching: virtual walkabouts may be arranged with the use of an interactive document (e.g. Google Doc) where the students read the texts and type their name under their favourite text.

Activity 3: Biographical montage

in this activity, the teacher collects some pictures, places names, dates and/or objects related to the life of an author. She collates them in some form of visual representation, either on the board or online (e.g. through Jamboard) and shows the students. The students have to first guess who the author may be and then the meaning of each element of the montage.

Expansion: competition can be introduced by making this into a guessing game in teams. Basic biographical data to conduct this activity can be found online. For instance, this is a short biography of poet and activist Maya Angelou and the bottom half of this infographic (the «quick facts» section) can be used for a guessing game.

Activity 4: 3 truths 1 lie and fun facts

An engaging way to present some historical background to the work at hand before reading it is through games. One game that lends itself particularly well to this kind of activity is the classic 3 truths 1 lie. The teacher writes 3 truths and 1 lie about, for example, Victorian times, and the students have to identify the lie.

A related idea might be to present a series of fun facts about a specific time period: for example, this list of fun facts about Shakespeare’s theatre might be an engaging introduction to the study of Shakespeare’s plays.

Activity 5: Manipulating the text

While we may think of literary texts as unchangeable, manipulating them may be highly motivational for learners: they have to understand and engage with the text, and use their creativity.

Sample activities include:

• Re-writing the story or part of the story from another character’s point of view

• Re-writing the story or part of the story as if set in the present day

• Changing key events in the story (e.g. What would happen if…)

• Changing key details of a character, such as their age or gender, and re-writing parts of the story. For example, how might Shakespeare’s Henry VIII be different if Henry VIII were a woman?

Would you like to find out more?

I hope you have enjoyed these 5 activities!

If you want to read more about them and learn about dozens more activities to teach literature in a fun, engaging way, try our course Teaching Literature in the Language Classroom for free!

But then, after all is said and done, there is often one big question (among many questions we have related to teaching literature):

how do we assess literature beyond mere text comprehension?

Fear not, because we have collected examples of assessment tasks you can use to assess literature in a video.

Watch the video for some innovative examples of:

• language-based tasks

• non-linguistic tasks

• tasks involving L1 and L2

• tasks based on previously unseen texts

Want to find out more about teaching literature, history and culture in an innovative way, in accordance with the CEFR?

Learn a practical framework to teach literature: try out our bestselling course Teaching Literature in the Language Classroom for free!

Here are some reviews from teachers who have completed the course:

I have viewed about a dozen different tasks and my impressions are that:

1. There’s a wide range in how broad topics are: for example, a rubric had “talking about online activities” as a topic, which seems a lot broader than, for example, a rubric focusing on a specific piece of literature, such as Macbeth.
2. Task rubrics also differ in terms of the number of parameters they specify: some include specific parameters (e.g. a student has just arrived from Ukraine and speaks English quite fluently; the class is 2nd year lower secondary), some do not.
3. There is a focus on technology in the sense of incorporating technology and digital tools in your lesson. So, if you decide to use textbook materials, try also to incorporate some tech in your lesson and make sure you explain your rationale for it.
4. So far, I have seen no explicit references to Unità d’apprendimento.
5. Some tasks make explicit references to aspects you need to consider in your presentation, for example:

Nella presentazione dovrà esplicitarsi la progettazione di un’attività didattica, comprensiva di:

• Indicazioni normative
• Il contesto educativo
• Finalità e obiettivi educativi e didattici
• La descrizione delle attività da svolgere
• L’allestimento degli spazi
• La durata prevista
• I materiali e gli strumenti adottati (con esempi anche di utilizzo pratico delle tecnologie digitali).
• Metodologie impiegate nella conduzione dei gruppi, se l’attività è prevista in forma laboratoriale.
• Le strategie di personalizzazione.
• Le modalità e gli strumenti per la verifica e la valutazione.

Even if these points are not mentioned explicitly, I would still recommend considering them in your presentation because they are all important to show you have thought critically and carefully about your choices.

How can I organise my presentation?

Good news: we have a free downloadable template that you can use to go over the points outlined above!

Download it:

Example: An AB24 task

Here is an interesting example of a task rubric for AB24:

Outline the plan of an activity to introduce and contextualize the novel Clarissa by Samuel Richardson.

Choose an excerpt to present the book to the class and elicit personal response, taking into consideration the author’s style, vocabulary and key themes.

Decide the type of school, the class, the average CEFR level of the students for whom you are preparing the materials.

Illustrate your choices of content, teaching approaches and teaching strategies.

Present your activity using digital technologies and an innovative approach.

How to go about it? Well, you can complete this whole task with the help of our course Teaching Literature in the Language Classroom! Here are some examples of units that will teach you how to complete it:

Unit 2: Approaches to teaching literature

• Part 3: Personal Response and Reader Response

Unit 3: From theory to practice: Comprehensive Approach and literature in the CEFR

• Part 1: A comprehensive approach to L2 literature teaching
• Part 2: Literature in the CEFR
• Part 3: Practical principles of instruction

Unit 4: Classroom procedures

• Part 2: Stimulating learners’ interest in literary texts
• Part 3: Maintaining learners’ interest

Unit 6: Working with genres: short stories, novels, poetry, drama

• Part 2: Working with genres: Novels

Unit 7: Multimodal literature

• Part 2: Multimodality in language teaching
• Part 3: Pedagogical principles
• Expansion task: evaluating an extended lesson plan

Unit 8: Assessment

• Part 2: Assessment and the CEFR
• Part 3: Pedagogical principles and tasks

Curious? Try our course for free:

We received dozens of requests from teachers for a database like this to practise for the upcoming concorso ordinario A24 and A25, and it’s now ready.

In this article, you’ll find the answers to the key questions about our database:

1. When is the database going to be available?
2. What does the database include?
3. How does the database work?
4. How many times can I take the quizzes?
5. Can I try the quizzes for free?
6. Where can I study the topics covered in the questions?
7. What topics are covered?
8. Can I get a discount?

1. When is the database going to be available?

Mark your calendar: the database will be available from Wednesday, 23 February – but it’s already ready for pre-order, if you like!

2. What does the database include?

The database includes:

• 300 multiple choice questions
• 300 brief explanations, one for each question, detailing why your answers are correct/incorrect
• References to books and links where you can revise the various topics
• A final bonus unit with a sample lesson plan and a lesson plan template

3. How does the database work?

This is not a course per se, but a database of 300 multiple choice questions that you can take to consolidate your existing knowledge and identify topics you need to revise.

Every time you answer a question, a brief explanation will pop up, as shown in this video:

4. How many times can I take the quizzes?

As many times as you like!

5. Can I try the quizzes for free?

Of course: we always want you to know what you’re buying before you start a course. Just go to the free preview and try one of the randomised quizzes or try our free history quiz!

6. Where can I study the topics covered in the questions?

There is a general bibliography for the full course, featuring free websites and books + a dedicated bibliography with free links in each unit, specific to the topics covered in each unit.

7. What topics are covered?

The quizzes cover English and American literature and history. There are 13 quizzes in the database, for a total of 300 questions and 300 explanations.

Units 1-5 cover British literature and history, with questions on both literature and history in the same quizzes. Unit 6 is about American literature and history.

The topics and sub-topics are of course not an exhaustive list of topics to study, but they have been chosen selectively as follows:

Unit 1 – Old and Middle English

Old English

• Roman occupation of Britain
• Anglo-Saxon invasions
• Languages after the Conquest
• Old English poetry
• Beowulf
• The Dream of the Rood

Middle English

• Middle English language
• The Wars of the Roses
• The Lais
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• John Gower
• Middle English drama

Unit 2 – The Renaissance

The Renaissance

• Henry VIII
• The English Reformation
• The Elizabethan age
• The Gunpowder plot
• Elizabethan drama
• Elizabethan poetry
• Language in Elizabethan times
• Francis Bacon
• Thomas More
• Philip Sidney
• Edmund Spenser
• Christopher Marlowe
• Philip Sidney

Shakespeare

• William Shakespeare (dedicated quiz on life and works)

The Early Stuart Period

• James VI
• The English Civil Wars
• The Metaphysical Poets
• The Cavalier Poets
• Theatres in the 17th century

Unit 3 – From the Restoration to Romanticism

The Restoration

• The Restoration
• Thomas Hobbes
• Restoration drama
• John Locke
• Samuel Pepys
• John Milton
• John Dryden

The 18th century

• The Acts of Union
• Journalism in the 18th century
• Alexander Pope
• Jonathan Swift
• Daniel Defoe
• Samuel Richardson
• Henry Fielding
• Laurence Sterne
• Thomas Gray
• Samuel Johnson

The Romantic Period

• The Industrial Revolution
• The Napoleonic Wars
• The Reform Acts
• The Act of Union
• Romanticism
• Romantic poetry
• The novel during the Romantic period
• Benjamin Disraeli
• William Blake
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• John Keats
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Lord Byron
• Jane Austen
• Walter Scott

Unit 4 – The 19th century

The 19th century and the Victorian Age

• Queen Victoria
• Social and economic conditions in the Victorian Age
• The publishing industry in the Victorian Age
• Charles Dickens
• Charles Darwin
• William Makepeace Thackeray
• The Brontë sisters
• George Eliot
• Alfred Tennyson
• Oscar Wilde
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Pre-Raphaelites

Unit 5 – The 20th century

From 1900 to 1930s

• The Suffragettes
• Anglo-French relations
• Women’s right to vote
• Social policy in the UK
• The Imagist movement
• The Bloomsbury Group
• The trench poets
• The Boer War
• H.G. Wells
• George Bernard Shaw
• Joseph Conrad
• Beatrix Potter
• W.B. Yeats
• T.S. Eliot
• Ezra Pound
• D.H. Lawrence
• E.M. Forster
• James Joyce
• Aldous Huxley
• Virginia Woolf

From the 1940s to the present day

• Decolonisation
• World War II
• Neville Chamberlain
• The post-war period
• The Marshall Plan
• Margaret Thatcher
• The Troubles
• Tony Blair
• Brexit
• Diana Spencer
• Winston Churchill
• The NHS
• Plaid Cymru
• William Golding
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• Doris Lessing
• Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter
• Dylan Thomas
• John Betjeman
• Evelyn Waugh
• George Orwell

Unit 6 – American history and literature

American history

• Native Americans
• Christopher Columbus
• English settlments in the Americas
• Slavery and life in the Americas
• The Great Awakening
• The Treaty of Paris
• The American Revolutionary War
• The Boston Tea Party
• US independence
• The Bill of Rights
• The Louisiana Purchase
• The Seneca Falls Convention
• The American Civil War
• Jim Crow Law
• World War I
• World War II
• Women’s right to vote
• The Prohibition age
• The Great Depression
• The abolitionist cause
• The New Deal
• The Truman Doctrine
• The Korean War
• John F. Kennedy
• Dr Martin Luther King
• Barack Obama

American literature

• The Colonial Period
• The Revolutionary Age
• Transcendentalism
• The Lost Generation
• The Beat Generation
• John Smith
• John Winthrop
• Anne Bradstreet
• Thomas Paine
• Thomas Jefferson
• Alexander Hamilton
• William Hill Brown
• Washington Irving
• James Fenimore Cooper
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Herman Melville
• Walt Whitman
• Henry James
• Emily Dickinson
• Robert Frost
• Ernest Hemingway
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• William Faulkner
• Mark Twain
• Gertrude Stein

8. Can I get a discount?

Good news: if you’re one of our LanguagEd course participants, there’s a 15% discount reserved for you expiring on Sunday 13 March! You will find your discount code in the courses you’ve already bought, as we explained in our newsletter. Please make sure that you correctly apply the coupon code and the 15% discount is deducted from your total before you confirm your payment – if in doubt, just drop us an email at chiara@languaged.org, we’re always happy to help!

But when it comes to teaching English literature to our learners, who use English as a foreign language… that’s often when it becomes problematic.

The importance of literature in the Italian context

Literature has always been a key pillar in the Italian education system. We can see its importance in the Indicazioni Nazionali, but we also have many concorso questions from the last few years, including:

Briefly illustrate how and why you would use Daniel Defoe’s description of Friday with your students. Define the school level and the types of activities you would choose (2016, classe di concorso AB24-25, prove supplettive).

Discuss the above quote from Virginia Woolf’s paper and briefly illustrate how you would encourage your learners to read literary texts. Define the context, the activities and the authors you would choose. Justify your choices (2016, classe di concorso AB24-25, prove supplettive).

Briefly discuss the above statement with reference to how you would introduce Shakespeare to your students. Define how you would use Shakespeare’s works and why, the school level and the main focus of your activities (2016, classe di concorso AB24-25).

How to teach literature

It is important for a teacher to have knowledge about and of English literature. However, what these questions focus on, is how to teach literature, i.e. what pedagogical procedures the teacher would employ and why.

If you’ve tried to look for information about teaching methodology that focuses specifically on this, you’ll know that it’s very hard to come by!

The issue of how to teach literature to L2 students has only recently become the focus of a body of research studies. As I explain in this article, the field of language teaching has undergone a number of shifts, with different methods being more prominent at different points in history. Simultaneously, the role of literature changed accordingly: from being key to language learning in Grammar Translation, to being excluded in performance-oriented method like Audiolingualism, literature has suffered a number of blows in the history of language teaching.

You can find out more about how the role of literature evolved in the history of language teaching in our video:

In any event, we can now safely say that literature has made a comeback: suffice it to say that the new CEFR, updated in 2018, refers specifically to the teaching of literature in various scales.

Key questions for literature teachers

Literature may be important, but when it comes to teaching it to students who study it in their foreign or second language, the literature teacher is faced with many questions. The main ones we have received and experienced ourselves include:

• What texts should be used in the literature class, i.e. what is defined as “literature”?
• Should literary texts be used as a vehicle for language learning or be the object of more academic study?
• What is the best teaching approach for literature in the L2 classroom?
• How can I encourage learners to read outside of the classroom?
• How can I deal with the difficulty of literary texts?
• How can I make my literature lessons engaging, awakening and keeping learners’ interest?
• How do I work with specific genres, such as poems, plays and novels?
• How can I reconcile the teaching of literature with the aims defined in the CEFR?
• What should I assess (e.g. literary or language competence)? How should I assess my learners (e.g. through tests, essay, portfolios, etc.)?

Answering these questions

To a certain extent, the answers to these questions will be very contextual: as we discussed in Designing Activities and Lessons, classroom procedures need to cater specifically to each teacher’s learners. What’s more, there will be institutional and national constraints that will restrict or modify our ability to work with literature.

However, research now exists that provide us with pedagogical principles of good practice. And the good news is, there’s a place where you can find the answers to all of these questions and more.

We have been reviewing dozens of teacher manuals, lesson plans, research studies and books about how to teach literature in the language classroom. We connected them to the concorso questions and designed our new course: Teaching Literature in the Language Classroom, conceived specifically for language teachers and teachers who are studying for the upcoming concorso scuola.

Like all of our courses, you can try it for free and see if you like it.

Curious? Have a look at the topics we cover in our course: