Teaching English through Hemingway’s Eyes

Teaching English through Hemingway’s Eyes

MURSY, Ahmad

Key words: Teaching Literature, Short Stories, Language Skills, Foreign Language Teaching, Classroom Activities ABSTRACT Literature is one of the most powerful fields that can be used to teach language due to its fascinating nature and the fun it could bring to the language class. According to Collie and Slater (1990), there are four key reasons for using literature in the classroom. These are valuable authentic material, cultural enrichment, language enrichment and personal involvement. Furthermore, while reading a contextualized text, students become familiar with many features of the written language, which develops their own writing skills. Not only does the teaching of literature develop reading and writing, but it also enhances both speaking and listening through oral reading, dramatisation, improvisation, role-playing, and group discussions. For these reasons, literature, and more specifically short stories, could be utilisd to teach various elements in EFL as well as all the language four skills. Hişmanoğlu (2005) suggests that teaching short stories seem to be a very helpful technique in today’s FL classes. He thinks that being short; they make the students’ reading task and the teacher’s coverage easier. He also asserts that an important feature of short fiction is its being universal as students worldwide have experienced stories and can relate to them. Moreover, short fiction, contributes to the development of cognitive analytical abilities by bringing the whole self to bear on a compressed account of a situation in a single place and moment (Sage 1987:43). In this workshop, Hemingway’s short story: ‘Old Man at the Bridge’ will illustrate the integration of literature and EFL. The participants will read the story and then discuss in groups what language points and skills could be taught through the text. Then the groups will share their ideas with each other and a conclusion will be provided by the presenter.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1707