• ACTIVITY 10

• a) At what age is it common for people in your country to leave home?

• b) What are their reasons for doing so?
• c) How do you think most people feel when they leave home? How did
you feel when you left home?
• ACTIVITY 11
• Here are some statements which describe the main characters in the story.
Read the statements and check the meanings of any words you don't know
in your dictionary. Then decide whether you agree or Materials design
and lesson planning: Novels and short stories disagree with the statement.
Give some examples from the text to support your opinion.
• a) Frank is a warm-hearted, kind and extrovert person with a zest for life.
• b) Eveline is a timid, passive person with very little sense of adventure.
• c) Eveline's father is a selfish bully, who behaves in an authoritarian way to his
children.
• d) Eveline is a sensitive, conscientious person with a strong sense of responsibility.
• e) Frank is an easygoing, superficial person who is unable to form close ties with
anyone.
• f) Eveline's father is an affectionate, humorous man worn down by poverty and drink
 5.5 Further tasks and activities for use with a short story

• In the previous section we looked at some activities and tasks for

exploiting a short story. In this section we look at some other ways of
doing this and classify them into three groups: pre-reading, while-reading
and postreading activities. Before reading through the activities listed
below, you are invited to recall your own experience of activities for
exploiting a text by completing Task 13
 Task 13

• Before you read the list of suggested

activities, write down your own ideas for
tasks and activities to use with a short story.
The following headings will help you to
organise your ideas.
 Pre-reading activities

• 1. Helping students with cultural

background
• 2. Stimulating student interest in the story
• 3. Pre-teaching vocabulary
 While-reading activities

• 1. Helping students to understand the plot

• 2. Helping students to understand the
characters
• 3. Helping students with difficult vocabulary
• 4. Helping students with style and language
 Post-reading activities

• 1. Helping students to make interpretations of

the text
• 2. Understanding narrative point of view
• 3. Follow-up writing activities
• 4. Follow-up fluency practic
 1. Helping students with cultural background

a) Reading or listening comprehension about the author's life or the historical and
cultural background to the story.
b) If library facilities are available, students do a mini-project on the social or historical
background to the story (e.g. life in Ireland at the turn of the century for Eveline).
Projects presented as a talk, essay or poster.
c) Predictions about the genre of the short story (e.g. What would students expect of a
story entitled Murder in a Country House}).
d) Discussion about events in students' own country during the period of the story. How
do they compare and contrast with the historical or cultural background in the story?
 2. Creating student interest in the story
• a) Students make very general predictions about the story, using pictures or
the dust jacket on the cover of the book from which it is taken.
• b) Group discussion about what the title of the story suggests.
• c) Prediction about the story based on reading the first paragraph only.
• d) Prediction about the story based on three or four words or on phrases
which the teacher selects from the story.
• e) General discussion questions about some of the themes which occur in the
story.
 3. Pre-teaching vocabulary

• a) Students brainstorm a lexical set which is

important in the story, for example legal
vocabulary in a story about crime.
• b) Matching important words in the story
with their dictionary definitions.
 WHILE-READING ACTIVITIES
• 1. Helping students to understand the plot

• a) Providing students with two or three overall questions to check they

have understood the gist of the story.
• b) Students write a brief summary of the plot in 50 words. They then write
another summary in 100 words and see what they have added.
• c) Students provide 'titles' for each paragraph
• d) Students are given a series of 'jumbled' sentences which summarise the
plot. They have to re-order them.
• e) Sentence completion activities (i.e. students are given the beginning of
a sentence about the story which they then complete). This is a way of
helping them to understand 'cause-effect' relationships within the story.
• f) Students are given three slightly different summaries. They have to
decide which is the best one.
 2. Helping students to understand the
characters
• a) Students choose from a list of adjectives which ones are most
appropriate for describing a particular character.
• b) Students rank the characters in the story according to certain traits; for
example which character is the most or least active, passive, aggressive,
gentle, decisive, etc.
• c) Students write 'references' for different characters as if they were
applying for a particular job.
3. Helping students with difficult vocabulary

• a) Give the text to one student or group of students in

advance. Let them look up any difficult words in a dictionary
and prepare a glossary for the others.
• b) Provide multiple choice questions to encourage the
guessing of meaning from context.
• c) Provide definitions for certain words in the text - students
match word to definition.
 4. Helping students with language and
style
• a) Close textual analysis of a section of the text.
• b) Using a section of the text to focus on a particular
grammatical problem that students may have; for example
blanking out all verb forms in a section of the text and
asking students to supply the correct tenses. The 'student
version' is then compared with the original, and their
stylistic differences discussed
POST-READING ACTIVITIES
 1. Interpretation of the main themes of the
story
• a) Providing students with different critical interpretations of the story
which they then discuss.
• b) Providing general questions to 'debate', focusing on any contentious
points in the story.
• c) Asking students to note down any lexical areas which might take on
a symbolic meaning in the story (e.g. darkness might be a kind of
metaphor for death in a particular story). Students then speculate about
possible symbolic associations for these sets.
 2. Helping students to understand narrative
point of view
• a) Students write diary entries or a letter describing
the events of the story, as if they were one of the
characters in the story.
• b) If the story is told by a first person narrator, then
students write a brief character description of the
narrator based on the evidence in the text.
• 3. Writing activities

• a) Writing a few paragraphs using certain stylistic features

of the story.

• b) Writing a review of the story

• 4. Discussion
• a) Reading and discussion of critical literary writings about the author of
the story or his or her works in general.
• b) Roleplay or acting out of a scene from the story.
• c) Critical discussion or debate about the world-view of values which
seem to be depicted in the text
Materials design and lesson planning: Poetry

• This chapter discusses the place of poetry in the language

classroom. It begins by focusing on those aspects of poetry which
are linguistically distinctive and then asks teachers to examine their
own beliefs about the relevance of poetry in the language
classroom. Activities for use with students at both lower and upper
levels of language competence are presented for discussion. Finally,
teachers have an opportunity to plan learning material for use with
their own students
6.1 Putting a poem back together again
• Task 1

• a) Think about the word sea. Write down any associations the word has for
you.
• b) Here is a poem with twelve lines. All the lines have been jumbled up so
they are not in the correct order. Try to reorder them so that they make a
complete poem. The title of the poem is 'maggie and milly and molly and
may'.
• and molly was chased by a horrible thing
• so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and
• went down to the beach(to play one day)
• may came home with a smooth round stone
• which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
• it's always ourselves we find in the sea
• maggie and milly and molly and may
• and maggie discovered a shell that sang
• milly befriended a stranded star
• For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
• as small as a world and as large as alone.
• whose rays five languid fingers were;
• Now compare your version with the original poem
which is given in the key. Is your version the same
as, or different from, the original? If it is different,
in what way? Which one do you prefer and why?
Think about the reasons why you ordered the
poem in the way that you did.
• What is distinctive about poetry?
• Two significant points emerge from using the activity in Section 6.1. Firstly, it is
clear that many of the techniques we commonly use in the classroom (in this
case, jumbling up a text and asking students to reorganise it) can equally be used
when teaching poetry. Secondly, poetry does have some fairly distinctive
features which differentiate it from other forms of discourse. It is useful to
identify these features because by doing so we might be able to help our students
grapple with certain problems they may encounter when reading poetry. It will
also enable us to decide how poetry can be of value to the language learn
• Task 6

• Look at the examples below which are taken from different poems.
Decide in what way the language in the extract differs from more usual or
standard English. In some cases, part of the text has been underlined to
help you
• EXAMPLE A
• Delicate mother Kangaroo
• Sitting up there rabbit-wise, but huge plumb-weighted.
• And lifting her beautiful slender face, oh! so much more
• gently and finely lined than a rabbit's, or than a hare’s,
• Lifting her face to nibble at a round peppermint drop,
• which she loves, sensitive mother Kangaroo.
(from D. H. Lawrence, 'Kangaroo' in A. Freer and J. Andrew (eds.) (1970) The Cambridge Book
of English Verse 1900-1939, CUP.
• EXAMPLE B

• Twas brillig. and the slithy toves

• Did gyre and gimble in the wabe . . .
• All mimsy were the borogroves.
• And the mome raths outarabe
• (from Lewis Carroll, 'Jabberwocky' in C. Ricks (ed.) (1987) The New Oxford Book
of Victorian Verse, Oxford University Press, p. 190.
• In Task 6 we looked at some of the ways that poetry may differ
linguistically from more usual or standard forms of English. We saw that
poetry reorganises syntax, invents its own vocabulary, freely mixes
registers and creates its own punctuation. Poetry draws creatively on a full
range of archaisms and dialects, and generates vivid new metaphors. It
patterns sounds and orders rhythms.
• Of course, as we said in Section 2.2, none of these effects are exclusive to
poetry. Advertisements, nursery rhymes, jokes, riddles, political slogans,
hymns and songs may also use such linguistic devices. But it is probably
true to say that poetry employs a higher concentration of such devices or
effects than other 98 Why use poetry with the language learner? forms of
discourse. For this reason, poetry has been described as deviating from the
norms of language (Leech, 1988, p. 5). This clearly has some important
implications for the use of poetry in the language classroom
 Task 8 Look at the following remarks, all made by language
teachers. Do you agree with them? If so, why? If not, then why not
• If poetry's deviant language, what's the point of using it with language learners?
They want to know what's right, not what's wrong!

• I've got a very demanding syllabus to get through, so there's no real time for
playing around with poetry in my lessons.
• My students don't read poetry in their own language, so how can they possibly
read it in English
• It's alright to use poetry with students who intend to study literature further
when they leave school. But reading poetry is too specialised an activity for
most students, isn't it?
• I've tried using a poem with students, but they found it difficult to understand,
and just wanted me to give them the 'right' interpretation of what it meant.
• I sometimes wonder if I've really understood the meaning of a poem myself -
it's a bit daunting then to explain it to a group of students
 Exploiting unusual language features
• In the previous two sections, we looked at some of the more unusual or
'deviant' features of poetry, and what implications this might have in the
classroom. In this section we look at how these features might influence
the design of tasks and activities to be used with a poem
• Task 10 Look at the following poem. With what
level of students do you think it could be used?
Underline any parts of it which you think are
linguistically unusual in any way
• Autobahnmotorwayautoroute
• Around the gleaming map of Europe
• A gigantic wedding ring
• Slowly revolves through Londonoslowestberlin
• Athensromemadridparis and home again,
• 5 Slowly revolving.
• That's no ring,
• It's the Great European Limousine,
• The Famous Goldenwhite Circular Car
• Slowly revolvin
• ACTIVITY 1 Before the students read it, dictate the first verse of the
poem as if it were punctuated normally, with commas between the names
of the cities. Tell the students to punctuate it as they think appropriate.
When they have finished let them compare their punctuation with the text
of the poem.
• What effect is created by the layout and punctuation used in the first verse
of the poem? Can the students find other examples in the poem where
separate words are placed right next to each other? What effect is created
by doing this
• Verse
• Diction
• Rhyme scheme-pattern of similar sounds
• Alliteration
• Simile
• ACTIVITY 2 Match the adjectives with the nouns in the box below to
make some new words. The first one has been done for you
• Now look at the penultimate verse of the poem. Can you find any
examples of words formed from the combination of an adjective and a
noun? Do you think you would find these combinations in a dictionary?
What effect does the poet create by using these combinations
Coffee illustrations magazines food milk
Pictures soup chicken photos television
• Helping students with figurative meanings. In the previous sections we
considered how poetry sometimes departs from linguistic norms, the
difficulty that this can cause for students, and the implications for
designing materials. Another difficulty students often have with poetry is
understanding the multiple ambiguities of metaphorical language - and
many poems are rich in metaphors or other figurative uses of language. In
this section we think about ways of helping our students to decipher (and
enjoy!) many of the figurative uses of language we find in poems
• a) Here is a definition of the word metaphor. Can you complete it by
filling in the two missing words: A metaphor is a (i) made between two
essentially (ii) things by identifying one with the other
• b) In each of the following examples there is at least one metaphor. Read
carefully through the examples and then answer the questions about them
which follow.
• A. She sweeps with many-coloured brooms, And leaves the shreds behind;
Oh, housewife in the evening west, Come back, and dust the pond!
(from Emily Dickinson, 'Evening' in V. Zundel (ed.) (1991) p. 29.)
• B. I think the idea is to bring Meg in as a new broom -
you know, to revitalise the department and get
everything going again.
 The Problem with Metaphors

• Metaphor- a connection or comparison made between

things which are usually considered to be unlike each
other.
• Students might find it difficult to understand and
interpret a metaphor in a poem for a number of reasons.
• If students are used to learning English in a way that parcels up meaning
tidily, they may feel uncomfortable when asked to speculate on the
possible metaphorical meanings for the woods in the poem
• Secondly, students may find it difficult to unravel
the connections between apparently dissimilar
objects or concepts.
• Another problem that can arise is that readers interpret
metaphors by drawing on their own individual
associations.
Helping students with metaphorical meaning
• Ask one group to look at the following lines from a poem, from which two
words have been removed. Ask students to predict what words could go in
the blanks. They can use dictionaries for any words that they do not know.
• (The lines are from 'Little Fish' by D. H. Lawrence in
Heaney and Hughes 1982, p. 247.
• The __________ ___________ enjoy themselves
• in the sea.
• Quick little splinters of life,
• their little lives are fun to them
• in the sea.
• Ask the other group to look at the same lines from the
poem but with different words removed, and to do the
same as the other group.
• The tiny fish enjoy themselves
• in the sea.
• Quick __________ ________________ of life,
• their little lives are fun to them
• in the sea
• b) Put students into pairs so that each pair consists of a
student from each group. Ask students to discuss how they
filled in the blanks and why. In the original poem what are
the little fish being compared to? What is the effect of this
comparison? Obviously, the word 'splinter' might be
difficult for students at this level, so encourage the students
to use dictionaries to establish its meaning
• ACTIVITY 2

• a) Divide students into two groups and ask them to write down any
associations they have for the following cluster of words: forest green
dragon
• Examples of activities for lower levels Below are
four poems with activities and tasks to
accompany them for use with students at lower
levels
 EXAMPLE A: CHILDREN

• 1. In pairs, complete the following sentences:

• Children always ……………..
• Children never ……………...
• Old people always ………….
• Old people never …………..

• Then read your sentences aloud to the other students in the class.
• 2. You are going to read a poem called 'Children'. With a partner complete
the poem using the words in the box below.

Heads ones morning is only

Old ears sleep are eyes
• Children
• Children _____________at night.
• Children never wake up
• When ____________ comes.
• ________the old ones wake up.
• Old Trouble ___________always awake.
• Children can't see over their _______________
• Children can't hear beyond their ______________
• Children can't know outside of their ______________
• The old ones see.
• The ________ones hear.
• The old __________know.
• The old ones _____________- old.
• (part of Laura Riding, 'Forgotten Childhood' in Heaney and Hughes (1982), p. 163.)
Using a poem with students at higher levels
 7. The background to the poem

• To make sense of the poem do the students need to know about:

- any cultural or historical information?
- the collection from which the poem is taken?
- the author's life or other works?
- what genre the poem is or to what literary movement it belongs?