Read this poem. Resist the temptation to skip this bit!

The widest prairies have eJectric fences,

For though old cattle know they must not stray

Young steers are always scenting purer water

Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires

Leads them to blunder up against the wires

Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.

Young steers become old cattle from that day,

Electric limits to their widest senses.

Read it through again and, as you do so, note down:

1. your first thoughts as to what it might be ‘about’;

2. the feelings it evoked or any personal experiences that came...

The following lesson plan demonstrates how literature can be used in the English language classroom as a starting point for giving students opportunities to practise their language skills in a meaningful and interesting context. At the same time it fulfils some of the aims as stated in the Experience Dimension of the Target Oriented Curriculum as it relates to Key Stages 3 and 4. Specifically it helps students to develop their own response to imaginative literature, in this case, a nonsense rhyme and to appreciate the importance of intonation in conveying meaning and different emotions. They have the opportunity to...

The power of radio plays to absorb an audience was made strikingly evident about sixty years ago in the United States. A famous actor, Orson Welles, produced a play about a Martian invasion of New York. It was so convincing that many people actually believed that an invasion was taking place, and panicked. Very soon the highways were jammed with cars fleeing the city. In the countryside, people went out with guns hunting for the alien spacecraft.

This story encouraged us to use radio plays with our Band 2, Form 2 students. Specifically, there were three reasons why we felt...

In the lines above, poet Seamus Heaney recalls his boyhood experience of reading English literature in Ireland. The texts he encountered in school said nothing to him about his Irish experience. He records how he went on to discover poems which did deal with the (rural, Irish) world he knew. He learnt, to his delight, that his own experience was a fit subject for poetry.

Heaney grew up in an English-speaking community. For many Hong Kong secondary school students, the events, values, settings, people, names and historical references in English literature can seem even more culturally remote than they were...

As the editors of this series have pointed out in the first volume, since the mid-1980s, ‘literary texts have begun to appear alongside other texts in textbooks and on language syllabuses worldwide’. However, the vast majority of literary texts, selected for use with non-native speakers learning English, are those from English Literature rather than from literature in English. Moreover, the texts chosen are usually those which have been written by native speakers of English. This is particularly true for poetry. There is a clear need to redress the balance. There is a burgeoning corpus of literature in English written by...

This chapter will outline the importance of drama in English lessons and illustrate how drama activities can be used to teach integrated reading, speaking and writing skills.

From a pedagogical point of view, drama has much to offer. Drama exemplifies how language is enacted to organize and formulate experiences, particularly feelings and attitudes. Drama activities can help students in learning to interpret, appreciate and communicate experiences in language. In language teaching, drama can be used to foster speaking skills: it requires students to project their voices while speaking, helps rid them of their inhibitions, prompts them to take speaking turns,...

Why use a children’s story, first encountered in primary school, with (upper) secondary students? The very familiarity of the story is its strength. Students can use the Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH) story as a framework for their own ideas. In order to play with a text, you have first to pay close attention to the original and master its characteristic features — what Abbs¹ has called ‘imaginative plagiarism’. Most writers and painters begin by imitating others before they find their own voice or style (see also Chapter 10). The second language writing ‘apprenticeship’ can offer scope for creativity too and...

Although the lessons which follow are based on the text of Romeo and Juliet, students are introduced to only a few lines of the original text. This is the age-old story of two teenagers in love. The unit of work which follows provides students with plenty of opportunities to consider contemporary examples of this theme and to interpret the play in ways that are relevant to their own lives and situations.

Filmed extracts of two modern versions of Romeo and Juliet have been included in the lessons to provide opportunities for language practice and textual analysis. In my view, film...

Twenty-five years ago, Barnes (1976) pioneered approaches which tried to discover how young adolescent native speakers of English in England responded experientially to stories, events and poetry. The particular poem that he chose to try out with these youngsters was Warning by Jenny Joseph. This chapter uses the same poem. Barnes’ strategy, of listening to what students have to say when they are reacting naturally to a poem, was considered innovative and daring at the time and attracted a great deal of attention in the English-teaching community in Britain.

The attitudes prevailing in those days were that students were there...

I have entitled this chapter ‘Imitation as Freedom’ because I believe that when working with student writers in a second-language setting, the use of models can be paradoxically liberating. I advocate treating these models not as ideals, but as licences for experiment and play. In having something to deviate or free themselves from, students often find that they have more to say, and that this is a kind of ‘imitation as freedom’. I will focus on poetry, because poems are easier to quote from and the imitations are plainer to see than when students are responding to prose. Poems (as...