Once we have provided a historical background of the English literature and we have examine the different types of texts, we will analyse the educational potential of the story in terms of: learning English language and culture, learning about other subjects, learning about the world, learning how to learn, and also about the follow-up work.
Ellis and Brewster (1991) suggest the following guidelines to make story-based lessons more accessible: provide a context for the story and introduce the main characters; provide visual support; explain the context, key words and ideas in the mother tongue, if necessary; identify your linguistic objectives; relate the story or associated activities to work in other subject areas if possible; decide how long you will spend on the story; decide in which order to introduce or revise the language necessary for understanding the story; decide when you will read the story; if necessary, modify the story to make it more accessible to your pupils; find out if there are any rhymes or songs that pupils can learn to reinforce the language introduced; and decide which follow-up activities would provide opportunities for pupils to use language from the story in different contexts.
Finally, it should be said that although all these guidelines can help us with storytelling-based lessons, in order to exploit literature we need to develop some specific strategies, such as the ones Duff and Maley (1999) suggest:
General strategies or approaches:
Flexibility. Any text can be approached in several different ways, depending on which aspect you choose to focus on.
Similarity. All texts are different, but have some features in common. The function of a general approach is to point out these similarities in texts, and so make it easier for teachers to find further material to suit the activity.
Developing ideas:
Picture stories, creating situations from dialogue and screen adaptations. For all these activities the emphasis is on creation and transformation.
Discussion activities. Here the emphasis is on the students’ personal involvement with a given theme or topic.
Specific strategies or procedures:
Reconstruction. Texts are either incomplete or in a defective form. The student’s task is to restore it to its complete, original, or most plausible form.
Expansion. Students are asked to add given elements to a text.
Replacement. Students remove certain elements and replace them with others.
Matching. In matching acti1.1. Strategies to exploit literature in the English classvities, the students must find correspondences between two sets of items.
Media Transfer. This involves the transfer of information in a text from one medium or format into another.
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