MB UNIUD

I started stuydying Literature when I was attending the third form of Liceo linguistico

I started studying English literature when I was at the University since before I had attended a Technical High School, where in the last two years I learned Commercial English. Nevertheless this helped me to appreciate the literary language, which, even if more difficult, is much more appealing than a commercial letter! At university literature was taught in a traditional way (i.e. frontal lessons) but some of the professors were so good that I still remember the tone of their voice and their favourite literary topics. They transferred to students their love for literature: that’s the point! I am still grateful to them because they make me appreciate the magic world of literature and gave me the opportunity to enter it.
I have no experience in teaching English literature in class. Nevertheless I had been giving private lessons to a student of “Liceo Copernico” for many years. In truth I didn’t do much: I just helped him with his homework and test preparation . From this experience I learned how little some students care for literature and how confused they are about it. Maybe teachers should try to involve all students of the class and not only the most brilliant ones. I know that this is hard work if not impossible… It is just a challenge…

I haven’t got any memory related to literature, apart from comics, before the III year of secondary school. Suggested by the teacher of Italian, it was during that year that I read my first book which was George Orwell's 'Animal Farm', a text that would have become one of my favourite. During that period, I started reading in English the songs of the American music of the 60s and some poems by Jim Morrison. The dimension of unconscious so well shaped by Morrison and my need to understand myself contributed to arise my interest in psychology. Following this interest, I read Freud’s 'The Interpretation of dreams' and Jung’s 'Man and his symbols'. It wasn’t a careful reading, I read them on my own and I could just pick up a few ideas. I anyway consider these ideas as the bases of my literary culture. Moving on my own in the vast world of literature, before enrolling at the University of Udine, I read some books by Herman Hesse, Richard Back and Aldous Huxley, which I consider of great importance in my personal growth.
During the years at the university, I studied English and Spanish literature but without working on texts apart from few cases. In the courses, we were explained how the literary movements developed and how important texts and authors were within a particular literary period. I read a lot of the classics of English literature but I analysed them only superficially. Amazingly enough, I passed through all the exams of literature without reading a text on text analysis.
I could have read something about it on my own, and I actually did it when I was writing my thesis, but my interests at that time focused on sociology, journalism and philosophy, and my favourite readings were essays and social reports about these subjects. During my preparation for the entrance exam at the school of specialisation for teachers, I started being interested in text analysis.
I really would like to get from this course some solid bases on text analysis, an instrument which could foster my passion for reading and help me in my work as English teacher. I had just one experience in the teaching of literature last year during my trainee period. I worked on a short story by Dinker Charak – an unknown Indian author – introducing basic concepts of text analysis such as narrator, flashback, characterisation and background. All in all a good lesson in my opinion.

When I attended the high school, literature was my favorite subject because it allowed me to know text and authors that I could enjoy also in my free time. In particular, I noticed that reading them in the original let me understand meanings often lost in translations… obviously… I love reading!!!
During the 3rd year I had a teacher who used to follow the book so that we studied literature following the sequence historical period – author – text trough reading, translating, and answering questions. I found it quite boring...
On the other hand, during the 4th and the 5th year I had a teacher who added visual materials and asked us to compare passages or authors, to express opinions, etc. Thanks to her I had also some hints about the XX century, that I didn’t study in depth during the university.
She still inspires me when I prepare my literature lessons for my training, where I use even the literature approach introduced on the SSIS literature course (1st year) as well as some techniques to capture the students’ interests (asking personal opinions or comparisons, listening to music, appeal to background knowledge in other fields…). I’m ‘performing’ my first literature lesson next week…will I reach my goal?

Looking back at myself as a teenager student I must admit that English was not my first school concern, compared with Italian and Greek, which literatures I was really fond of. Nevertheless I decided to take English as an experimental subject, that means that I studied it for all the five years and not only at ginnasio, as in the basic curriculum, and during the three years of liceo I was introduced also to English literature. My English teacher, though very nice and well-prepared, was quite old fashioned both in her approach towards students and in her teaching beliefs and techniques. Classes were not involving nor motivating, we just dealt with authors and texts in the traditional way as other colleagues of mine have already explained: socio-cultural context, life and works of the author, translation and analysis of the text (poem or extract) and comprehension exercises! During University years I dedicated more energy and passion to other courses in the area of friulan literature than to English literature and, in fact, I ended up in graduating with a thesis on contemporary friulan poetry. But, all the same, during my free time I have always enjoyed reading and I explored many genres and many literary periods, from English classics (Wuthering Heights is one of my bests) to historical novels and journalist reports. Also as a young teacher I’ve got no positive experience to add as far as English literature is concerned, since my only experience in this field is a couple of weeks as a temporary teacher at Percoto, where the teacher I was substituting asked me to follow the text book guidelines and to use a strictly traditional way of teaching. Getting to a conclusion I’d like to say that since I really adore teaching and since my experience (both working and training) is limited to middle school students or adults (at Stringher), I hope that this course could represent a good chance for me to learn how to deal with literature at school in a more communicative, involving and intelligent way!

Looking back at myself as a teenager student I must admit that English was not my first school concern, compared with Italian and Greek, which literatures I was really fond of. Nevertheless I decided to take English as an experimental subject, that means that I studied it for all the five years and not only at ginnasio, as in the basic curriculum, and during the three years of liceo I was introduced also to English literature. My English teacher, though very nice and well-prepared, was quite old fashioned both in her approach towards students and in her teaching beliefs and techniques. Classes were not involving nor motivating, we just dealt with authors and texts in the traditional way as other colleagues of mine have already explained: socio-cultural context, life and works of the author, translation and analysis of the text (poem or extract) and comprehension exercises! During University years I dedicated more energy and passion to other courses in the area of friulan literature than to English literature and, in fact, I ended up in graduating with a thesis on contemporary friulan poetry. But, all the same, during my free time I have always enjoyed reading and I explored many genres and many literary periods, from English classics (Wuthering Heights is one of my bests) to historical novels and journalist reports. Also as a young teacher I’ve got no positive experience to add as far as English literature is concerned, since my only experience in this field is a couple of weeks as a temporary teacher at Percoto, where the teacher I was substituting asked me to follow the text book guidelines and to use a strictly traditional way of teaching. Getting to a conclusion I’d like to say that since I really adore teaching and since my experience (both working and training) is limited to middle school students or adults (at Stringher), I hope that this course could represent a good chance for me to learn how to deal with literature at school in a more communicative, involving and intelligent way!

I'd love to say that things, as you said, have changed in the meanwhile but in some schools there are still some teachers that teach literature in a traditional way.
Fortunately however I had a very good and enthusiastic English and Italian teacher that managed to keep alive and raise my curiosity for literature seeing that I was attending a technical school where classical studies usually "aren't" that important! Therefore mostly thanks to my English teacher, that kept on suggesting me books to read arousing my love for literature, I finally realised that I wasn't interested in what I was studying at high school (also due to the fact that I wasn't good in maths!) and that I wanted to study languages and literature at university.
I also think that maybe the same teachers unconsciously made me love their job.
Unfortunately I don't have any experience what so ever in teaching literature, because my training period took place only in technical schools.

But I must say that I can't wait!!!

When I was at high school, it seemed like there was no difference between English and Latin literature. It was all about studying the historical and socio-cultural contexts, the authors’ biographies with endless lists of their major and minor literary production and, last and least, translating and analysing a text; or better, taking note of the teacher’s translation and analysis. It was a matter of passive memorization. Little space was left to comprehension and analysis activities, and things got even worst during the fifth year, when the teacher made us study on aseptic hands out prepared by himself. We were never exposed to any other material, no CDs, no movies, nothing involving. Oral and written tests were a mere regurgitation of the teacher’s words.
Anyway, I must admit that my teacher was quite good at analysing texts, which he did very accurately, lingering over every single word or expression, figure of sound and speech and so on. This is an attitude that I have assimilated and which accompanies me even when reading for fun.
Last year, at SSIS, I came into contact with a more involving method of teaching literature that implies starting from the text and leading the students towards an active role which, I recognized, is more motivating and meaningful.
But when I started my teacher training at Stellini, the book was exactly like the one I had had at my high school: first the context, then the texts, and silly mechanic comprehension activities. I don’t think this is bad but I wanted the students to have a more active role in their learning process. To this end I prepared some activities meant to activate their reasoning and I used a video in order to increase their motivation. Most of the students proved to be involved by that. The video was especially appreciated, and this is why I’d perticularly like to learn how to exploit different resources such as videos and multimedia in general not only as a source of motivation but also as a study material.

Since I’ve attended Zanon before the introduction of English literature, I’ve discovered it at University. Thanks to a wonderful and passionate professor, Antonella Riem Natale, I’ve started enjoying this subject, but there wasn’t time to touch all the topics…this fact made me fear teaching literature in high school, that’s why my first choice is ‘scuola media’. Today I’ve had my first class on Romeo and Juliet and gosh, I enjoyed it! The meaningful aspect for me is, in spite of all knowledge, the relation the teacher creates with students and I believe that the starting point in teaching is simply to be yourself, with your good and weak points. They (students) will appreciate it.

Your comments will feed our next session I\'m sure :-)
looking for ideas?
aware of difficulties
textual analysis as a challenge
...
what else?

During secondary school I changed my English teacher every year and all of them dealt with literature in a very traditional, impersonal way. The classic path: contest, author, text). But during the fourth year my relationship with English changed: we had a very moody and unbalanced teacher and to keep on good terms with her was a great effort for us, but she loved English and she really loved English literature. She had a particular way to carry on her lessons since she made us reflect upon things, upon every single word if necessary. She usually started her lesson from the text and we had to find out all the necessary pieces of information we needed. Now she might probably be surprised in knowing that, despite all the problem we had, she passed me on her love for literature and that all the things done with her are stored with particular care and sometimes used.
My experience at Stellini has been really great and interesting. During the lessons I tried to involve the students, making them active part of each lessons. I tried also to induce them to reason deductively while reading a text and I tried also to create connections with the things they already knew and love. I must confess that I have been very lucky because the students in that class were very interested and participated a lot in the lessons but I can imagine how this is just the exception and not the rule…
During my short experience in teaching literature I discovered that I really need some suggestions of possible activities to use while presenting a text and I also need some cues on how to deal with literary texts in non traditional ways, using different kind of sources and materials.

I was lucky as a student in the secondary school because I had a fantastic American teacher who passed me on her enthusiasm and love for English literature, as well as the charm of her role as teacher. Her approach was already communicative!She used English in class, and used to vary her lively lessons with group or pair activities, songs, sketches to perform related to extracts from novels or poems to analyse!
Now that I'm doing the training I understand how difficult it is to build up something interesting with the materials I have. Students get bored if a "traditional approach" is used, therefore I always think "If I were a student, how would I get involved while reading, for example, a Tale from the "Canterbury Tales"?". This is what is happening to me now that I'm working with the students at Percoto school....it's a big question indeed, sometimes even pair or group activities are not enough...for this reason I have lots' of expectations from his course and I really hope it will help me !!

Oooops, that's a difficult matter! :-)