Poems ■■
‘This Is Just To Say’ (William Carlos Williams)
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‘Grass’ (Carl Sandburg)
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‘The Road Not Taken’ and ‘Acquainted with the Night’ (Robert Frost)
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‘My Brother Lives Too Far Away’ (Mark Van Doren)
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‘Dreams’ and ‘I, Too, Sing America’ (Langston Hughes)
Short stories ■■
‘A Lamp in the Window’ (Truman Capote)
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‘The Cop and the Anthem’ and ‘The Gift of the Magi’ (O Henry)
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‘Love of Life’ (Jack London)
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‘The Story of an Hour’ (Kate Chopin)
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‘In Another Country’ (Ernest Hemingway)
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‘Going Home’ (William Saroyan)
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‘Sorrow for a Midget’ (Langston Hughes)
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‘The Magic Barrel’ (Bernard Malamud)
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‘The Snow Goose’ (Paul Gallico)
Methods of teaching Guided by the course objectives, the method of teaching was based on a reader-response approach where the focus was on students’ exploration and response to the texts (Amer, 2003, cited in Khatib et al., 2011). Thus, students were not expected to spend time figuring out exactly what was meant by the authors by their works. Rather, they were encouraged to think about what they read and how it was relevant to their own life and experience. Ultimately, they were expected to recreate the meanings of the works based on what they understood and felt.
Realising that literary language was often challenging for students, the teacher made considerable use of pictures and guided questions to help them in the initial stage of exploring the texts. Specifically, these devices were aimed to set students thinking about what they read and to arouse their emotions as triggered by the poem or story. By doing this, the teacher was able to motivate students to further exploit what they had learned. As a principle, the pictures were chosen on the basis of key themes and images in a poem or a story. These pictures were accompanied by questions to orient students into thinking and finding the meanings of the texts. As a type of scaffolding and guidance (Liang, 2011), the questions fell into four main categories: lead-in, comprehension, analytical/ interpretation and evaluation. The teacher made it clear to students that it was more important for them to justify their opinions than to worry about whether they were right or wrong. Differences in students’ opinions were used as the basis for their discussion. In this way, the teacher was able to promote students’ higher order thinking skills, such as analytical, critical thinking and creative thinking skills. The following section exemplifies and illustrates a lesson on a famous poem written by Robert Frost, ‘Acquainted with the Night’, in three main stages of ‘pre-lesson’, ‘whilelesson’, and ‘post-lesson’.
Fostering learners’ voices in literature classes in an Asian context |
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