Maybe you’re just starting out as a literature teacher, or maybe you’re an experienced teacher, but you long for some innovative ideas for teaching literature?
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!
