Literature appears to be treated as the ‘guest’ of the language classes and it seems that many teachers do not welcome this guest very warmly as they consider they waste precious time that could be more profitably used by working on grammar. However, an imaginative teacher could very well use the information the students have worked on during a literature class to do some grammar exercises. The effort of imagining such exercises is really challenging and the results of a grammar-literature class are double: reinforcement of the literary work and do exercises on difficult grammar structures. Any of the exercises below can be adapted to any grammar problem to be worked on. The difficulty level must be adapted to the students’ level of proficiency, and there has to be a balance between the amount of literary information and the difficulty of the grammar problem, so that the students will no be overwhelmed by any of the two aspects.
All the activities and exercises below can – definitely – be improved and feedback on them performed by the teacher when preparing new lessons will probably show that the solved materials should be kept as they might be used again, by simply reversing the task.
Almost any grammatical tense/ construction/ pattern could be reinforced or revised using literature as the basis for the exercises, thus making our students reinforce and revise both aspects of the language class almost without realizing that they are doing so.
Correcting the errors and mistakes the students make during these activities is, again, the teacher’s choice. Errors might appear both in the information – although this would happen far less often if the materials are carefully prepared by the teacher prior to the lesson – and in the grammatical structure the students are practicing. Grammatical errors or mistakes should be corrected whenever they appear during these activities if the teacher keeps in mind that the aim of the activity is to give students further practice on a specific grammatical problem.
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Dear Melania, your topics about literature and its use with the students are so graet and valuable and I think they will help me in my PhD
Thank you for your kind words.
I intend to add more, I’ll just have to find the time to do so.
Stop by from time to time, you might find some new pages to help you with your PhD. Good luck with it and let me know if I can be of help.