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I would like to start with a critical
look at the literary texts in coursebooks and the reading lists in Flemish
secondary schools and of the participants in the workshop. Then I will
elaborate on a teenage fiction project which I set up for 16-17-year-olds
in a secondary school in Brugge. The aim of the project was to provide
text for extensive reading. The project focused on teenage fiction as
novels for adolescents are generally written in a natural, present-day
English. Moreover, the combination of narrative and dialogue makes teenage
literature particularly accessible to learners of English. I will address
the following questions: How can you motivate students to read and find
the ‘right’ books? What sort of activities give your students
a real sense of achievement and allow them to enjoy literature? In what
way can novels for adolescents provide a stepping stone to literature
with a capital L? Do we need to teach the literary canon? In what way
can we expand that canon?
I will present a number of task sheets and reading portfolios that can replace the traditional book report and that have proved useful and rewarding in the teenage fiction project. I will finish by providing a reading list including books that are accessible to adolescent learners of English. |
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I
am a staff member of the Teacher Training Department of the KULeuven,
Belgium. There are teach seminars on reading and literature in EFL. I am also a lecturer of English for Specific Purposes at the Kortrijk Campus of the same university. I also teach English at a secondary school (Sint-Franciscus-Xaveriusinstituut) in Brugge. With Lieve Deprez I co-wrote a book on using teenage fiction in EFL (After English Class: Jeugdliteratuur in de Engelse les. Wolters-Plantyn, 2007). |