The Importance Of English Literature 1

The Importance Of English Literature

Grant C. Buchan PhD

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Table of Contents
The Importance Of Learning And Teaching English Literature Introduction Why Teach Children Literature Decline Of Reading Literature Teaching To Read English Literature The Teaching Cycle And Reading Stages Four Stages Of Reading Literature Conclusion References

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The Importance of Learning and Teaching English Literature Introduction

The famous Helen Keller had such magnanimous words to describe the importance of English literature for her. She said that, Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. To think that she was blind and deaf, Helen Keller was able to see the magnificent colors of life, visit many wonderful places and touched many lives because of her love for literature. She experienced life with no boundaries because she loved to read and she shared her own thoughts with people also through literature. Essentially, it is through reading that we learn. It is where the importance of English literature emerged. When we read English literature, we will learn many things from our readings. Thus, the essential nature of the importance of literature in literacy learning is so immense that it could not be measured fully. Literature in most of its guises appears in a narrative form and, as Hardy (1978) so aptly put it, narrative is a primary act of mind. Beyond its use as a pedagogical tool, literature seems to speak to our elemental need for

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story. Bruner (1984) called for using literature as a way into literacy because it is most constitutive of human experience. Literature, he says, is an instrument for entering possible worlds of human experience (p. 200) that is the driving force in language learning. Why Teach Children Literature? As it is a driving force in language learning, teachers are encouraged to exhort children to enjoy literature. As children reach the middle childhood years (grades three, four, and five) they are beginning to exercise more independence, to participate in formulating and establishing their own rules, and to view experiences from the perspective of others. Most are eager to direct their own learning and to go beyond the limits of their everyday lives. At this stage of development, they are starting to explore more abstract concepts, especially in collaboration with others. They are able to appreciate actual and fanciful interpretations of similar experiences, such as real accounts of space travel and science fiction, and are beginning to develop a sense of history. During this middle childhood period, children can develop a sense of autonomy and cooperation as they gain proficiency in their use of literacy.

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Literature helps students perceive a classroom social context that views them as active cultural organisms helping to create the very circumstances of their own learning. They need to feel safe using their home discourses in the classroom to discuss, infer, predict, persuade, and critique their own reading and writing. They need access to other ways of using language and literacy (folklore, oral traditions, etc.) that are part of their cultural group but unfamiliar to them. And they need opportunities that help them to advance cognitively by expanding concepts and content through use of the language of higher-order thinking. As students gain experience in and knowledge of written language, they will begin to examine the discourse of the home, classroom, TV, and other environments (Harman & Edelsky, 1989). In childrens interactions with literature, just as in those found in conversation, the social context of the situation is systematically related to what children write (Couture, 1986). Placing students in confined roles, as powerless responders will only lead to a narrow use of literacy, restricted tests, and limited literacy growth. Ample opportunities for discussions, small group work, and sharing of the childrens experience while reading and writing will create social interactions that stimulate student interest and lead to diversity in the practice of their literacy skills. Studies around a theme or issue involving students working in groups can mediate and increase their

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proficiency in both oral and written language Children can assume new roles when: 1. They have the opportunity to make choices in selecting what books to read, what topics to study, and what forms of writing to use when presenting their ideas; teachers can supply the environment, activities, positive reinforcement, and opportunity for reading, thinking, and writing, but the motivation and choice should come from the student 2. They engage in reading and writing processes within a context that allows diverse interpretations and permits them to see themselves and find their own voices 3. They make metaphorical transactions with authors and discover the joy of reading good literature; talking about books, getting to know authors, and responding to books provide positive support for the development of literacy and self-sufficiency 4. Their interests and experiences are reflected in the available classroom materials and activities (Perez and Torres-Guzman, 2002). The primary goal of studying literature is for children to discover and experience the lives of others, different time periods, places, value systems, and the many world cultures. The rich language and cultural perspectives

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found in a variety of literature can expand childrens cultural repertoires. Using literature as an integral part of the literacy program provides meaningful social contexts that encourage students to compare and contrast literature with their own experiences and to expand their background and knowledge. Literature cannot only stimulate students to speak, think, and read, but it also leads them to write with increasing ability. Studying good literature allows students to observe the authors skilled use of language. In addition to learning about others experiences through good literature, children can also develop vocabulary, and learn how to listen, identify, and appreciate effective models of good writing. Through exposure to different varieties of writingpoetry, prose, drama, and nonfiction-informativeand by developing good reading strategies, students learn to think about experiences and storytelling in new ways.

Decline of Reading Literature

Reading literature has always played a significant role in American life. As a result of recent social and educational changes, however, the use of reading as an aid to understanding and social betterment has increased notably. Furthermore, the results of scientific studies have made us more keenly

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aware of the social effects of reading, both desirable and undesirable, and of the influence of reading and study habits on scholastic success. As a result, there is heightened appreciation today of the importance of reading in meeting personal needs, in furthering scholastic attainments, and in promoting social stability and progress. This is particularly true in high schools and colleges where youth in ever increasing numbers are making wide use of all available aids to learning. The importance of reading literature would be a determining factor of any persons literacy. However, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, 2000), thirty-seven percent of fourth graders in the United States cannot read at a basic level. They cannot read and understand a short paragraph of the type one would find in a simple children's book. For children living in poverty, these statistics are even worse. In many lowincome urban school districts the percentage of students in the fourth grade who cannot read at a basic level approaches seventy percent. Nearly half of the 6.5 million children with disabilities receiving special education are identified as having a specific learning disability. Of the 2.8 million children with a specific learning disability, approximately 80 percent to 90 percent have their primary difficulties in learning to read. Of the children who will eventually drop out of school, over seventy-five percent will report

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difficulties in learning to read. Surveys of adolescents and young adults with criminal records indicate that many have reading difficulties. Approximately half of children and adolescents with a history of substance abuse have reading problems. Needless to say, the inability of many of our nations children to develop basic reading skills is not just an education problem; it is a national social and health problem as well. Moreover, Alvin Kernan reported in The Death of Literature (1990) that his university students now assume that they are more likely to find something in the way of truth on their computer screens than on the printed page. Kernan believes that we are presently undergoing a number of cultural shifts that affect reading: (1) economic--in our marketplace economy, publishers no longer underwrite serious writers who don't sell; (2) social--we are an entertainment-driven society in which entertainment is pitched to a mass audience; and (3) technological--we are evolving from a print society to an electronic one. Writer Cynthia Ozick lamented this tyranny of accountants and computers (Fraser, 1997). Independent booksellers are being replaced by large national

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chains whose displays feature best-selling money earners, not writers such as Ozick, and whose coffee shops are better staffed than their book aisles. Electronics challenge print partly because, as Sven Birkerts (l994) explains, The book dead-ends us in ourselves, whereas the screen is a sluice into the collective stratum, the place where all facts are known and all lore is encoded (p. 188). Some high school English departments have shifted their emphasis from printed literature to practical language arts skills (technical preparatory programs) in order to position their students to join this cultural stream. Yagelski (1994) justifies this shift in our age of inconceivable change (p. 31). A focus on literature in high schools is irrelevant to the challenges our students now face. He believes that we should remove literature from the center of our English curriculum and, if we must teach it, use it to help students understand language and language use (pp. 34-35). If books are under threat at present, this challenge requires teachers of English to articulate just why we think reading literature is important. We need an answer for the question What can literature teach us? Birkerts launched an eloquent answer to this question in his collection of essays The Gutenberg Elegies (1994). Birkerts called us to recognize the

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loss we individually and collectively would suffer if the printed page inaugurated by Johann Gutenberg's movable-type printing press died. He asks, Is literature offering us less? and answered, No. He continued, Is it that what is offered is no longer deemed as vital to our well-being? and implied, Perhaps (p. 191). He reasoned that the climate of late modernity may have rendered us less able to appreciate literature's relevance, but literature remains the unexcelled means of interior exploration and connection-making. . . . So long as there is a natural inclination toward independent selfhood, so long will literature be able to prove the reports of its death exaggerated (p. 197). Literature is a way of talking about important and difficult aspects of our universal experience (p. 191).Elliot Eisners book The Enlightened Eye (1990) elaborated what literature can teach by describing the interior acts it prompts. Eisner, who worked at the intersection of art and education, explains that literature can help the reader do the following: 1. Imagine new worlds: envision new possibilities; create new visions 2. Become seers: look into what we have never seen; penetrate beyond what language tells; unveil the familiar, or, as Coleridge said, call to our attention that which we have neglected

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3. Stabilize the evanescent: solidify the internal; grasp the fleeting; fasten the slippery thought 4. Exchange our world with others: glimpse another's world and acknowledge that reality; catch who we are and who we have been; enlarge our receptive sensibility 5. Rely on judgment without established criteria or standards: judge without received rules or predetermined interpretations 6. See the universal in the particular: see the significance in the slight; see metaphors power 7. Learn to play: prompt the spirit of playfulness, nimbleness, and gamesmanship; refute Ciardis observation There is no poetry for the practical man. In The Developing Imagination (1963), Northrop Frye articulated the high stakes in the exercise of the imagination: The ultimate purpose of teaching literature is not understanding, but the transferring of the imaginative habit of mind, the instinct to create a new form instead of idolizing an old one, from the laboratory of literature to the life of mankind, society depends heavily for its well-being on the handful of people who are imaginative in this sense (p. 58).

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The belief in reading as the foundation of all learning is not only a reaction to criticism, it is also reflective of a vision. Many teachers believe that reading, as a form of communication, is a major resource for making meaning of the world. Thus, through the teaching of reading, teachers make their students human, that is, they transmit to them the meaning making skills that distinguish humans from other species. This view equates literacy with cognition and the uniquely human capacity for the creation of symbols: I consider reading and writing and literacy as thinking ... and thats just the most valuable thing you can have in this world. Were all trying to make meaning out of life, out of everything we do, see, hear, think, and I feel that is what my big goal in school is. It sounds like it's right out of a book, but it is my innermost need, and teachers that I can feel a real connection with are those teachers that I can feel that their whole goal is thatto make sense out of the world and that's the most important thing I do with kids. Reading, writing, literacy combining all of the curriculum into that goal is what I think is the most important thing (Melba, a sixth grade teacher).

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Lastly, Mccray, Vaughn and Neal (2001) revealed teachers should encourage children to read literature because despite considerable past challenges in learning to read, all of the students will eventually signify willingness to learn to read and recognize the importance of reading to later successes in getting and keeping a job. Many stated that there was something wrong children with reading disabilities and that is why they had difficulty. However, the researchers found out that the students did not mind participating in what might be perceived as elementary or basic work in reading if it would lead to better reading skills for them. Fact is that they only expressed concern that they would be embarrassed if friends recognized that they were learning to read (p. 17).

Teaching to Read English Literature

Developing the interest to literature is not just a teachers job. This is why the Department of Education (January 2005) gave parents some tips on how to help their child read: Helping your child become a reader is the single most important thing that you can do to help the child to succeed in school-and in life. The importance of reading simply can't be overstated. Reading helps children in all school subjects. More important, it is the key to lifelong

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learning. Here are some tips on how to help your child become a reader: Start early. When your child is still a baby, reading aloud to him/her should become part of your daily routine. At first, read for no more than a few minutes at a time, several times a day. As your child grows older, you should be able to tell if he wants you to read for longer periods. As you read, talk with your child. Encourage him to ask questions and to talk about the story. Ask him to predict what will come next. When your child begins to read, ask him to read to you from books or magazines that he enjoys. Make sure that your home has lots of reading materials that are appropriate for your child. Keep books, magazines and newspapers in the house. Reading materials don't have to be new or expensive. You often can find good books and magazines for your child at yard or library sales. Ask family members and friends to consider giving your child books and magazine subscriptions as gifts for birthdays or other special occasions. Set aside quiet time for family reading. Some families even enjoy reading aloud to each other, with each

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family member choosing a book, story, poem or article to read to the others. Show that you value reading. Let your child see you reading for pleasure as well as for performing your routine activities as an adult-reading letters and recipes, directions and instructions, newspapers, computer screens and so forth. Go with her to the library and check out books for yourself. When your child sees that reading is important to you, she is likely to decide that it's important to her, too. If you feel uncomfortable with your own reading ability or if you would like reading help for yourself or other family members, check with your local librarian or with your child's school about literacy programs in your community. Get help for your child if he has a reading problem. When a child is having reading difficulties, the reason might be simple to understand and deal with. For example, your child might have trouble seeing and need glasses or he/she may just need more help with reading skills. If you think that your child needs extra help, ask his teachers about special services, such as afterschool or summer reading programs. Also ask teachers or your

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local librarian for names of community organizations and local literacy volunteer groups that offer tutoring services. The Department of Education (January 2005) explained that: No matter how long it takes, most children can learn to read. Parents, teachers and other professionals can work together to determine if a child has a learning disability or other problem and then provide the right help as soon as possible. When a child gets such help, chances are very good that she will develop the skills she needs to succeed in school and in life. Nothing is more important than your support for your child as she goes through school. Make sure she gets any extra help she needs as soon as possible and always encourage her and praise her efforts. Moreover, Alan Purves (1981) surveyed thousands of English teachers to answer this basic question: What are the goals for teaching literature? The English teachers surveyed appear essentially to agree on their goals for teaching literature: Student self-understanding is first; critical and analytical skills are second. Yet, their answers to a question about how they plan to accomplish those goals reveal significant differences. Teachers were asked to rate each of seventeen questions that could be asked about a literary text.

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These are seventeen questions that a teacher might ask students about a piece of literature. These were ranked in importance of each on a four-point scale, from trivial (1) to very important (4): 1. _____ What literary devices did you notice in the work? 2. _____ Is the work symbolic or allegorical? What is its theme? 3. _____ How would you describe the language of the work? 4. _____ What happened in the work? Who is narrating it? What is the setting? 5. _____ How is technique related to what the work says? 6. _____ What is the structure of the work? How is it organized? 7. _____ Is the work well written? Does the form support the content? Is it well constructed? 8. _____ How would you interpret the character of this person? What is the significance of the setting? 9. _____ Did you find that any of these people are like people you know? Did anything like this ever happen to you? 10. _____ Do any of the formal devices have any significance? What symbols do you find in the work? 11. _____ What is the genre of the work? In what literary tradition is it?

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12. _____ Does this work describe the world as it is? Do you find the world like the way it is described in this work? 13. _____ What is the author teaching us? What is the work criticizing? 14. _____ What is the tone of the work? 15. _____ What emotions or feelings does the work arouse in you? 16. _____ Is this work about serious things? Is it significant literature? 17. _____ Does the work succeed in getting you involved in its situation? Is it successful in arousing your emotions? Purves (1981) found that teachers were more divided over the questions they would pose than the goals they had set. That division ran along a line that has been drawn and redrawn for decades between questions and classrooms that were text-centered and those that were reader-centered. English teachers have struggled between their sense of responsibility to the text and their responsibility to the students, their responsibility to matters of form and to matters of personal experience. That division is mirrored in a parallel line running between classrooms that are teacher-centered and those that are more student-centered. By joining the teaching profession, you join these issues. In your classroom, will you focus on exploring the text in all of its historical, biographical, cultural, psychological, thematic, and formal richness or on exploring students responses to the text in all of the

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historical, biographical, social, and cultural richness of those students? Will you assume the role of knowledgeable interpreter of the texts riches or as facilitator of student discovery?

The Teaching Cycle and Reading Stages

Milner and Milner (2003) attempted to bridge the lines of the teachers roles in teaching literature and did justice to the claims of text and reader, teacher and student. They presented the bridge as:

A three-phase cycle for teaching literature in the classroom--how we study texts

A four-stage construct for reading literature that lies primarily inside the second phase of that cycle

Innumerable teaching activities pertinent to each of these four stages

The teaching cycle and reading stages, like any construct that breaks something complex into segmented parts, will be misleading unless they are understood, absorbed, and then employed them as general models for classroom planning. Milner and Milner (2003) introduced the three-phase teaching cycle that will provide a benchmark for the sequence of a class approach to literature. As illustrated in Figure 1, it was dubbed as enter, explore and extend:

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Figure 1. Teaching Cycle and Reading Stages (From Milner and Milner, 2003). This method is planned to be used in individual literature lessons--how we get into and out of a text with our students. Its title alone suggests the direction, not unlike the way you would negotiate a creative project or an intellectual challenge or a visit to a foreign country or our national capital. Some teachers refer to the same rhythm and movement with a title of prepositions: into, through, beyond. Borrowing from reading teachers, others call a similar teaching sequence before, during, after. Still others refer to the sequence as pre-reading, reading, post-reading. Each of these names evokes an overarching strategy for opening texts with students. These steps could be

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imagined as a road map with which you can travel or a scaffold on which we can build our daily literature lessons or thematic units.

Enter
Whether our students are capable readers who arrive at a work with rich expectations or less proficient readers who can barely decode the words or picture a script in their heads, they are helped by activities that invite them to enter the ideas of the text. These invitations can take many forms; but all are designed to activate students thoughts, experiences, and feelings about something essential in the text that follows or to build background knowledge necessary for reading it. (Such knowledge might include concepts of the genre that are new to these students or the text's context that is unknown.) George Hillocks (1995) evokes a useful analogy when he calls prewriting strategies gateway activities. Similar activities in reading open a gate for students to make them ready and receptive for the text they are about to enter. So before reading excerpts from Homers Odyssey, the teacher might consider activities such as the following:

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Free Writing

Free-write in response to a prompt: List qualities you consider to be heroic. Name one public person you would consider to be a hero and explain why.

Imagine you have just met your cultural hero. List five questions you would like to ask him or her.

Was your cultural hero female? Are the roles of female heroes different from the roles valued for males?

Write a letter to your cultural hero and ask him or her for advice about a problem you are facing.

Tree Diagram

Think about someone you consider a cultural hero. Create a tree diagram in which you name the person (on the trunk) and name the qualities you admire (on the branches).

Think-Pair-Share

With a partner, identify your hero and explain why you regard him or her as heroic.

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Interview

On the Internet, research the cultural hero identified above. Prepare yourself to assume the identity of your hero in an interview by your classmates.

Mini-lecture

Briefly introduce students to Homer and his role as a rhapsodist (part oral historian, part entertainer). Discuss what was going on in Greece between 900 and 700 B.C. (when the Odyssey was composed) and the oral tradition surrounding the Trojan War. Ask students to research this author and period further via the Internet or encyclopedias.

Mini-lecture with Technology Follow-Up

Introduce the names and a brief character sketch of several of the prominent heroes, gods, and goddesses students will meet in their reading. Ask students to research Greek mythology and legend on a website such as the following, select a favorite, and prepare a verbal sketch for the class Gallery of the Greeks. For example, The Enclyclopedia Mythica (http://www.pantheon.org/mythica/): This site

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contains almost 5,000 articles, illustrations, maps, and genealogical tables of mythological characters from around the world. Wilhelm, Baker, and Dube (2001) evoked another metaphorical connection when they refer to this phase of teaching as frontloading. They suggest a set of questions teachers might ask themselves as they consider and plan frontloading activities for a unit or a lesson. These questions include the following:

How does your activity activate or build the students' prior knowledge or background information regarding your unit theme?

How does the activity work to motivate students for reading and inquiry regarding the theme or driving question of your unit?

How will the frontloading activity work to organize inquiry, set purposes, and consolidate learning about the theme throughout the unit? That is, how will it help students set purposes for their reading, focus their learning, clarify what they are coming to know, and help them monitor their learning progress? (p. 103).

The above-mentioned first four activities tackled the reader response stage of reading literature--personal triggers, suppositional readers, conceptual readiness, and synergistic texts are especially designed as pre-reading

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activities, advance organizers, or anticipatory sets. Each invites students to anticipate the text, connect with it in advance, and prepare to integrate it with their previous experiences, both personal and cognitive. Unlike many advance organizers, however, they skirt the dangers of leading students toward a more knowledgeable teacher's foregone conclusion. Kelly (1992) cautioned that pre-reading activities, even the most carefully designed, can push a discussion in a prescribed direction and thus inhibit divergent thinking (p. 87). The entering strategies focus the lesson on students and elicit their responses. By aiming at the personal, texts begin to resonate in students before they begin to make sense.

Explore
Once students are engaged, they are more confident, ready, and equipped to move through a work of literature. This part involves different means for exploration through all stages of response, interpretation, formal analysis, and critical synthesis. Wilhelm (1997) enumerated ten dimensions of response to narrative literature that move through stages of reading similar to ours. The activities of exploring could be built on his scaffold. Wilhelm is concerned that after students enter the story world they then show interest in the storys action, relate to characters, see the storys world, elaborate on it,

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connect literature to life, consider significance, recognize literary conventions, recognize reading as a transaction, and evaluate the author and the self as reader. One of the great challenges of teaching literature is to remain open to alternative approaches, to take the risks to try them, and to marshal the energy to critique them. The multiple demands on the teacher make the lure of the tried-and-true, teacher-directed, large-group discussions of literary interpretation or exercises of literary knowledge often irresistible. We were taught in such classrooms, quite different from those we choose for our students, so we must constantly align our planning with the principles of the teaching cycle and the reading stages that we will enumerate. Scholes (1985) explained how such principles alter the traditional role of teachers. The job of teachers is not to produce 'readings' for our students but to give them the tools for producing their own. . . . Our job is not to intimidate students with our own superior textual production: it is to show them the codes on which all textual production depends, and to encourage their own textual practice (p. 24-25). McGonigal (1988) described the unhealthy consequences of traditional teaching that relies on the vicarious literary analysis of others. The student

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can understand literature in a third person impersonal sort of way, but dependence on a critic or on Cliffs Notes only strengthens a student's belief that literature belongs to others, that literature is somehow written in a foreign language comprehensible only to teachers and critics. On the other hand, when the readers response becomes central, wooden responses to literature give way to perceptions that literature, good literature, lives. But literature breathes and murmurs, cajoles and lambasts, laments and rejoices only when the reader makes it do so (p. 66). We can therefore find guidance with Louise Rosenblatt (1976), who provided a benchmark for our choosing just which strategies we will use in teaching literature. She cautions that we must be very careful to scrutinize all our procedures to be sure that we are not in actuality substituting other aims-things to do about literature--for the experience of literature. We can ask of every assignment or method or text, no matter what its short-term effectiveness: Does it get in the way of the live sense of literature? Does it make literature something to be regurgitated, analyzed, categorized, or is it a means toward making literature a more personally meaningful and selfdisciplined activity? (p. 279)

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Novelist Sue Ellen Bridgers (1997) goes to the heart of why literature is such fertile ground for exploration. She believed that stories interpret the past and explain the present. They shape who we are and inform who we become. Of all the conscious acts we perform, the most important is claiming our own story. Stories matter more for the questions they raise than the answers they provide. Exploration and discovery lie at the heart of story.

Extend
If students have entered texts, explored them, and even come to care about them, they are ready to extend them. Literature opens a way of seeing, of understanding more than our individual experiences might yield, of making sense of our world, of transforming the daily, and of discovering the significance there. Extending means taking the ideas, urges, and preachments of the text into our daily worlds. Yagelski (1994) envisioned such a classroom that takes literature study beyond traditional analysis and uses it to involve students in social, political, economic, and cultural questions. Thus, students might read Hemingways Fathers and Sons to discover what his story reveals about the complexities of parent-child relationships before they go on to write narratives about their own relationships with parents and to explore related issues of "gangs, teen

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fashions, school reform, drugs, music (p. 35). In one classroom, collaborative groups chose a project that involved both reading and writing. For instance, students concerned about their citys juvenile curfew ordinance read the ordinance, wrote letters, followed public debates, went to computers for information, polled local opinion, and finally wrote a report to the school board. Scholes (1985) explains that the whole point of argument in Textual Power is that we must open the way between the literary or verbal text and the social text in which we live. Rosenblatt (1969) sees the consequences of readers personal involvement in the text in the trajectory of their entire lives: Personal involvement in literature should reveal it as a life activity that has value in itself and that can offer [a reader] personal satisfaction, ethical and social insight. It can help him to develop a personal sense of values and to bring a human and humane perspective to bear on our mass civilization (p. 1012). Within these three phases of the teaching cycle, the explore stage will almost always be the longer and more elaborate. It will comprise the bulk of teaching time. Yet the first and last stages are no less important for your students and make the vast middle matter to them. The general models of classroom organization like lecture, whole-group discussion, small-group work, and individual work could be used here to present most of teaching

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activities. As the teaching plot thickens, we can see that in daily lesson planning these would need to be placed within the structure of enter, explore, and extend--our three-act classroom play. We might think of ourselves as drafting a script for our classroom stage. We will want to organize each part of your lesson with a beginning, middle, and an end in mind. As we become more experienced, our script may become less elaborate on paper, but you should not forget this general cycle of literature study.

Four Stages of Reading Literature

Milner and Milner (2003) introduced the four stages of reading literature that were developed on principles of personal and cognitive development. These stages are reader response, interpretative community, formal analysis and critical analysis. This four-stage construct capitalizes on how people most naturally, effectively, and pleasurably read. Its general movement is from the concrete to the abstract, from the simple to the more complex, and from a pre-critical immersion in the text to a critical perspective on it. In this construct, consideration of a literary work begins in personal response and grows more studied and complex.

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Reader Response
All readers bring prior experience and knowledge of life and reading to any text. They are not blank tablets on which texts make unproblematic, predictable, definitive imprints. In the first stage, reader response, individual readers are face to face with the text. The center of our pedagogical concern is with the reader's unmediated, felt response to the text. The teacher's role at this level is to remove scholarly, historical, critical baggage and to free students for their personal, unencumbered encounters with the text. Reader response activities shift ownership for interpretation from teacher to student. They send the message immediately that studying literature is not a matter of a teacher's asking questions about a predetermined interpretation and the students scurrying to find the correct answer. As Rosenblatt (1978) stressed, texts--the words on the page--differ from aesthetic experience--the readers living through the text by entertaining it, imagining it, and entering its life. The first stage invites students to the most personal engagement with literature--to an unmediated, felt response to the text. Often English students approach pieces of literature as dry, isolated academic events disconnected from real life. The strategies of reader response attempt to reconnect

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literature and life. They take what Rosenblatt (1978) considered the necessary first step of reading literature: paying close attention to what this particular group of words stirs up within each reader (p. 137). Although often the end-of-selection questions of literature textbooks influenced by reader response theory elicit general areas of association and emotions, the range of personal stirrings is far richer and more nuanced. Rosenblatt (1995, pp. 30-31) describes this interior experience: What, then, happens in the reading of a literary work? The reader, drawing on past linguistic and life experience, links the signs on the page with certain words, certain concepts, certain sensuous experiences, certain images of things, people, actions, scenes. The special meanings and, more particularly, the submerged associations that these words and images have for the individual reader will largely determine what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-beduplicated combination determine his interfusion with the peculiar contribution of the text. For the adolescent reader, the experience of the work is further specialized by the fact that he has probably not yet

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arrived at a consistent view of life or achieved a fully integrated personality. One activity that might be helpful in the first stage would be opinion surveys. These surveys are some of the most effective means we know of engaging students in a text. We merely ask students to respond to a set of strong, declarative statements related to the text. These statements can be drawn from general observation, the words of others, or an interpretation of the text. Straightforward statements appeal to students--they require only a simple, direct response. But although they invite quick, direct reaction, they can open rich possibilities for exploring the text, particularly when they raise points of uncertainty and expose honest differences of reader opinion. After students state their agreements and disagreements, we sometimes ask whether they think the author would agree with them. This shifts the argument beyond the class and invites students to project and to judge beyond their own points of view. The following statements pose both textual and related issues. Concerning Ordinary People by Judith Guest, Deborah Appleman (1992) posed the following: 1. Most answers to problems lie within yourself.

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2. Families that look perfect on the outside are not always perfect on the inside. Of the short story, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates, teacher Ed McNeal posed the following: 1. People like Arnold Friend are prevalent in today's society. 2. Connie is wrong to let things get out of hand. 3. Most people, at first appearance, judge a book by its cover. 4. Never trust strangers, even if they seem genuinely nice. 5. Who isn't fascinated by evil? (singer Marvin Gaye, 1985). 6. Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it (novelist James Baldwin, 1962). 7. It [rock music] is the youth culture and there is now no other countervailing nourishment for the spirit (critic Allan Bloom, 1987). Of The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier, these questions could be posed: 1. You should always be an individual. 2. You should try to fit in after moving to a new place. 3. Small decisions can often greatly change your life.

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After her students read Romeo and Juliet, Mindi Fry asked them to respond with yes or no to these general and specific statements: 1. I believe in love at first sight. 2. I believe that looks are a big part of liking someone at first. 3. I don't think its right for parents to interfere in my relationships. 4. Family background will not matter to me when I fall in love. 5. Juliet was wrong to disobey her parents; family comes first. 6. Juliet's parents have her best interests in mind when they discuss her marriage to Paris. 7. It was wrong for Friar Laurence to become so involved in the romance. Then, Anna Milner asked students to answer true or false to the following opinion survey after they have read Machiavellis The Prince: 1. I believe that a leaders moral character is as important as his political leadership. 2. A politician's job is to direct and represent public policies--his moral character and behavior are personal matters irrelevant to the fulfillment of his duties.

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3. In certain situations it is acceptable to bend rules, especially if it is for a good purpose. 4. All good rulers must, to some extent, be feared. Although this first stage is typically aimed at students independent reactions to a text, ones that are not controlled by teachers, we would know that some students need to be urged into response with approaches that are active without being controlling.

Interpretive Community
When students have entered and responded to the world of the story or poem, they are ready to join a community of other readers. The interpretive community is reader response in chorus. We hope that the students' first impressions will generate enough momentum to carry these initial speculations and queries further. The notion of students' discussing ideas together and building on each others' ideas is not new, but the emphasis here remains on students statements of their own responses and discovery of their own meanings. The chemistry for group work of such potential is delicate and builds over time or, with some students, not at all. But Langer (1995) paints the compelling picture we envision. She is watching a group just beginning to gel:

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After getting to know one another better, the openness, willingness to assume others' perspectives, and willingness to disagree and confront one another increased greatly, but always with sensitivity and support. These are the types of discussions that students should learn to engage in, where they have room to explore topics that touch their lives, to use the text, related literature, and the author's life, as well as one another's and their own. What a preparation for life, if students can learn to interact in a community where their ideas can stimulate new awarenesses and possibilities, and where the reading of literature can assume a profound role in their human as well as cognitive development (p. 44). A community of readers--whether they be pairs, small groups, or whole classes--profit from these shared reactions. The individual perspective broadens, new insights are aired, multiple perspectives are entertained, tentative hypotheses are tried, the claims of the text are sharpened, and initial impressions gain a more considered shape. The ideal is that the classroom culture excludes no one, treats individual ideas generously, accepts dispute, balances impressions with reflection, and aims to arrive at meaning together.

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An effective activity for this stage is Readers Theater. This activity approaches a text through performance rather than discussion. Patricia Kelly (1992) makes a strong case for class dramatization of poems or prose and dramatic passages as a way into meaning. Here is how she set up her lesson in a tenth-grade class whose students had enjoyed creative dramatics activities but were not experienced in readers' theater:

Groups of students prepare to perform selected sentences in order to project specified moods and emotions (five minutes).

As a whole class, the students guess the feeling being conveyed. (This exercise lets groups cohere, performers grow less self-conscious, and the class grow accustomed to conveying with the voice an interpreted meaning to an audience.)

In groups, the students prepare a performance of a poem (in Kellys case, Sylvia Plaths Words), namely to wrestle with the meaning of the poem and how [one] might present that meaning to an audience. (Each group reads the same poem.)

As a whole class, the students enjoy the readers theater performance of each group.

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As a whole class, they discuss the readings and consider this question: Why did you decide to present the poem as you did? (pp. 88-89)

Kelly describes the subtle, but crucial, benefits of the follow-up discussion: These whole-class discussions following Readers' Theater presentations broaden students' understanding of the literary work because they hear the thinking that underlies different interpretations. The discussions are not a "reporting" of the group activity; neither are they like a class discussion of the poem. And therein lies their benefit. They are similar to an "expert" group approach because each group is an expert on its presentation, but the motivation is somewhat different. Each group wants the others, who have appreciated its rendering of the literary piece, to understand the uniqueness of its interpretation. Although they are teaching each other as expert groups do, students do not perceive the discussion in that way; they see it as an informal sharing. (pp. 89-90) Several other advantages grow from this readers theater: Less academic students can shine, both in their performances and in their expert perspectives on them; and students read the poem many times more than they would in traditional discussions as they try to understand its meaning,

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prepare their performances, perform, listen to other performances, and discuss. They may not address some difficult images or lines, but they seem to understand it in a holistic way," a sensing, emotional approach rather than an explicative one (Kelly, 1992, p. 90). In this stage, we might invite students to add their responses--feelings as well as interpretations--in an attempt to fill gaps, refine small points, and even offer radically different readings. In other words, we invite them into our own interpretive exploration without the usual teachers resources of textbook manuals, critical reviews, university course notes, and years of reflection. Such an experience allows less sophisticated readers to see that even a very experienced reader must struggle with a text to begin to forge an understanding that is coherent, comprehensive, and satisfying. Iser (1980) delineated this internal process not as smooth and continuous but as one in which we readers look forward, we look back, we decide, we change our decisions, we form expectations, we are shocked by their nonfulfillment, we question, we muse, we accept, we reject (p. 62). At the conclusion of the teacher's visible interpretive acts, we can include students in our active exploration and we may all agree that, although admirable, the reading was incomplete and the piece deserves further reflection.

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Formal Analysis
In the third stage, formal analysis, students begin to explore the formal dimensions of the text more intentionally and to reflect on the author's craft more consciously. Questions of form should be reached only after the earlier stages of enjoyment, engagement, and conceptualization have commenced. For too long, literature study meant only an analysis of literary terminology and authorial craft. More recently, high school literature study has centered on a personal encounter with the whole text. We suggest you attempt both: personal response and, when students are engaged, careful formal analysis for some students. Some students may never move to this stage; their level of abstraction is insufficient, their engagement with the text too fragile, and their suspicion of literature as irrelevant too strong. With others, questions of literary knowledge such as conventions and literary terminology may arise naturally out of their push to understand texts more fully. If students care about what they are reading, they often realize on their own or with a little prodding that understanding the craft of the author deepens their understanding of the text. Students can appreciate literature in deeper, more nuanced, and more enduring ways. Their awareness of craft becomes part of their response to the next texts they read.

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At this stage, the students journey into literature could end at this point, midway through our four reading stages, and they would have touched the essential humanity of the fictive world. However, Rosenblatt (1968) reminds us that the literary work is not primarily a document in the history of language or society. . . . As a work of art, it offers a special kind of experience (p. 278). That experience is rich with personal meaning but with formal literary meaning as well. In this stage, it is essential to discuss ways in which to enlarge students capacities to recognize, appreciate, and finally internalize dimensions of the special experience of reading literature. We should suggest ways to sensitize them to the evolution of literary conventions, authors creative variations on traditional techniques, their unique responses to textual and cultural challenges, and the literary effects of their completed works. We then hope to reconnect the students first distinct responses in reading with their understanding of the literary context in which they occur. Thus, the ultimate aim is that by enlarging their intellectual and emotional capacities to respond to literature, we also enlarge their capacities to notice and respond to their multilayered lives. The activity that would be appropriate in this stage is to organize formal analysis in the classroom. Organizing the classroom around students who are actively engaged in response and making meaning is as important to formal

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analysis as it is to the two preceding stages. Questions of form should arise after personal reflection on literary texts has already begun. We distill other important principles about how to lead students toward formal knowledge about literature. Langer (1995) presented four particular situations that provide environments for active thinking and learning about formal elements. The four could be seen as levels of increasing readiness to explore the formal dimensions of literature:

Students have neither the concepts nor the language to talk about them.

Students have the concepts but not the language. Students have less complex understandings than their language implies.

Students have the language and the concepts and are ready to think about them in more sophisticated ways.

In the midst of other instructional approaches, when students are engaged in a thoughtful discussion of literature and their curiosity takes them beyond what they know, or when you sense that they have a tacit understanding but

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inadequate words for its expression, or when they are ready for a more sophisticated grasp, then seize the opportunity for exploring formal matters. Beach and Marshall (1991) suggest that we gauge instruction in formal matters by noticing and reflecting upon, unpacking, our own responses to a given text. If we realize that we need to know certain conventions in order to understand and interpret a piece, we should build a formal lesson around those conventions. If we encounter textual challenges in an assigned text, we must devise lessons that empower students to figure them out when they, too, are challenged. If, for instance, we realize that the author's or narrator's tone is crucial to understanding, we can sensitize students to tone by even brief oral demonstrations. Jago (2001) suggested that an easy way to teach tone is to read to students with a voice that carries the intonation, phrasing, and modulation that express the particular feeling or meaning of a writer/speaker. Students will be asked to utter to a partner or small group the simple query Where are you going? or Where have you been? or the direction Come see for yourself as though a parent or friend had uttered these with a range of emotions from anger to solicitousness to joy. (Even if students only speak these with a different emphasis on key words, multiple possible meanings become apparent.) Our hope is that the concepts presented will become a part of the working vocabulary of subsequent

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discussions of literature and therefore become internalized, integral, and natural, not imposed, isolated, and artificial. The formal becomes embedded or integrated with the attempt to make sense of texts. If interest has been aroused, students will entertain this exercise with greater willingness; but more important, they will be more open to discovering that form can provide answers to genuine questions. In their next encounter with a text, they may be more likely to read with a consciousness that structure and meaning are interfused. In time, they might independently experience the pleasure of recognition that an author has created meaning through the interplay of character, plot, and structure. Lastly, encouraging students to write could also be helpful. When students write fiction or drama or poetry, they face the same choices authors face. Rosenblatt (1995) acknowledges that One of the best ways of helping students gain this appreciation of literary form and artistry is to encourage them to engage in such imaginative writing (p. 48). They wrestle with questions of form as practical matters, not as theoretical ones. After students have written their own stories, they are positioned to consider what they did and, in turn, to more consciously understand the choices authors make as well.

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Critical Synthesis
In critical sythesis, the reader takes a step further back from the text and regards it with a conscious, if rudimentary, knowledge of literary theory. Some of that theory arises from the natural generalizations that teachers and students develop from numerous particular observations. These might include what literary standards distinguish commercial from serious fiction or good from great poetry, why some texts are considered classics and others are not, and why English has a privileged position in many high schools as the one course required for all four years. Even a simple understanding of the approaches of various schools of literary criticism historical, biographical, formalist, feminist, archetypal, or Freudian critical perspectives--can awaken students to the diverse ways in which a single text might be interpreted by a reader or literature generally might be understood by a culture. Although this stage may appear to be appropriate only for rare students, we have found it to be freeing and invigorating to students at all levels. Knowing a range of possible approaches to literature grants students a sense of ownership over their own interpretations. In time, such analysis deepens and complicates initial personal responses to texts.

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At this stage, students already have a secure grounding in reading that has become personally owned, communally interpreted, and formally considered. This is why we could now step into literary criticism. We could observe that periodicals published for secondary English teachers often offer different critical theories implicitly in their many pedagogical ideas and activities; but these theories usually remain tacit and applied, not defined and articulated as theory. Textbooks also offer much pre-reading space to historical and biographical perspectives and post-reading apparatus to formalist and, increasingly, reader response questions. Applebees (1993) national survey of literature instruction found that the critical approaches that were cited by teachers as influencing their teaching of a representative class were New Criticism (50 percent of the teachers in the random sample of public schools) and reader-response (67 percent). . . . Teachers reported that recent alternative approaches, including feminist criticism, had had little influence on their instruction. In fact, Applebee found that 72 percent of the teachers he surveyed in the schools with reputations for excellence reported little or no familiarity with contemporary literary theory (p. 122). Different critical perspectives produce very different approaches to texts and generate very different questions about them. When critical theory remains relatively unexplained, students have difficulty developing a coherent

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framework for comprehending the field of literary study and individual pieces within it. One day they are asked, What did the author intend? The next day they are asked, What does the literary history reveal? The next question is What is the plot structure, and how does it contribute to unity? Then they are queried, How do you feel about this book? No sooner is one critical perspective implied as central than another possibility is introduced that challenges it. The consequence deepens the common student error of attempting to arrive at an authoritative, usually reductive, interpretation of a text. Students do not develop the useful tools that are available for approaching any text. They are left to wonder on what criteria literature is to be understood and judged and conclude that only the wise, learned, or especially gifted can know. However, we should proceed to introduce critical theory cautiously. Until students are comfortably and personally engaged and are confident of their own immediate and considered responses, they should not be asked to make their considerations more studied. If formal analysis is a stretch for students, critical synthesis will be a longer one. Yet psychologists tell us that one of the characteristics of the young adolescent's intellect is metacognition, the ability to think about ones thinking. Many adolescents have moved beyond concrete stages of intellectual development and are capable of abstract

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reasoning. Piaget did not believe that cognitive development could progress without this ability to reflect abstractly. Critical synthesis invites students to that level of abstraction. Formal analysis began such a standing outside and observing how the textual elements functioned as parts of a whole. Critical synthesis takes a further step back from the text to look at the whole field of literary study. If students are curious, if they pose critical questions about the ground rules for a good interpretation, and if they are moving to metacognitive perspectives, then perhaps the time is ripe. Those who can take this step discover a whole new way of seeing. Appleman (2000) articulated some of the benefits of understanding alternative critical perspectives: They bring into relief things we fail to notice. Literary theories recontextualize the familiar and comfortable, making us reappraise it. They make the strange seem oddly familiar. As we view the dynamic world around us, literary theories can become critical lenses to guide, inform, and instruct us (p. 2). These critical lenses alert us to different perspectives and give us the ability to recognize complexity, not only in literary texts, but also in the world. Desai (1996) observed that literary theory reminds us that we do not live in isolation nor do we read and interpret in isolation. We understand what we read through some combination of our selves as readers and the text with which we interact, but

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this is never free of the multiple contexts that frame us (p. 169). Bonnycastle (1996) believed theory can be a guard against single-minded authority: Studying theory means no authority can impose a truth on you in a dogmatic way--and if some authority does try, you can challenge that truth in a powerful way, by asking what ideology it is based on (p. 34). Critical theory, then, can have a clarifying and a deepening impact on our ability to read literature and ourselves. At its best, theoretical knowledge will become intertwined with and enrich personal response.

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Conclusion
Learning to appreciate the importance of English literature could be a selfactualizing experience. Literature could serve as a tool for all of us to understand many realities in life. It could also be a vehicle that could take us to far off places that we thought we could dare not go. Lastly, it could be a mirror for us to understand ourselves, our family and other people and bridge our differences because we had connected with them through literature. This is why teachers and parents should encourage students to read English literature as often as they can. There are several ways, described above, to motivate students to appreciate literature. Encouraging them to read would help them enrich their knowledge not only with literature, but it could also bridge their appreciation to all subjects in their curriculum. In successful literacy programs, both readers and writers make meaning and have real purposes and audiences. Helping students to understand the processes of making meaning and communicating with diverse audiences may require some learning activities that model this process. This is where the role of the teacher is emphasized. Teachers should facilitate activities that would encourage children to read and later appreciate English literature on their own.

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Moreover, reading literature requires students to respond to books affectively as well as cognitively. Students respond emotionally to the literary text as a whole. These feelings are unique and tied to each readers life experiences. Emphasizing personal involvement in literature develops in students an imagination, a sense of wonder, and an active participation in the literary experience. To my mind, bringing people and literature together is one of the highest acts of humanity in education.

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