Last Wednesday evening I was standing in for my Director, who has a Post-Proficiency literature class once a week here at IH Buenos Aires Teacher Training.
He asked me to do so last Thursday and low and behold on Friday morning I was moderating Ratna Ragunathan from IH Malaysia’s Live Online Workshop ‘Weaving the magic of literature circles’ and I quickly found my standby lesson staring me in the face.
The idea of literature circles is that each learner takes a different angle towards the book / story they are reading and leads a discussion of that angle when the circle meets in class.
The different roles:
The story we read:
The Story of An Hour – Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin
Since I didn’t know the learners it was difficult for me to assign them roles I thought they would get into, so I asked who would like to be the Illustrators and then gave out the other roles at random. In the end there were eight students, so I ended up giving out the first four roles to pairs, who then helped each other prepare the role in relation to the story and then the class split up into two circles to discuss the story.
To be honest I was expecting more discussion to come out of the roles, I felt students at this level (post-proficiency) should have been able to mine the text for more ideas and have more interesting responses to it. Perhaps a combination of things played against my expectations for the activity being fulfilled:
- the students not knowing me and therefore being a little hesitant as we got to know each other
- the students not finding the story so inspiring – I’m sure there are many better stories out there that could be used with the literature circle roles
- it being the end of a long day for most of them and they simply weren’t fully-focused on English
- my expectations were simply too high in the first place after Ratna’s fantastic workshop
Actually, by the time they had got through the four roles about an hour of the lesson had passed, so the circles had taken a good 30minutes, which is actually an excellent amount of continuous speaking in a normal kind of class – it just didn’t seem that fluent and engaging as they were doing it.
Then I gave out the last two roles and each circle discussed one role in preparation fro swapping over and, in pairs, leading the discussion of their new role with a new pair of partners. This lead to more good conversation, and as before I had trouble finding anything to give them constructive feedback on language-wise, so I didn’t.
And then finally I gave each of them a part of Kate Chopin’s biography and they had to discuss the story in light of her life, thus sharing with each other more details about the author and the time she lived in. It would have been good to have more time for this stage of the lesson, since it ended up being the most interesting discussion for them.
So, all in all, a successful first attempt at using literature classes and I will definitely go back and use them again, although perhaps with more concrete texts, particularly at lower levels.
A Muse Amuses 
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