TEMA 1
AUTHORS AND GENRES SUITABLE TO BE
USED IN THE ENLGLISH CLASS.
TYPES OF STORYBOOKS.
CONTENT
 1. INTRODUCTION
 2. PERIODS, AUTHORS AND GENRES SUITABLE TO BE
USED IN THE ENLGLISH CLASS
 2.1.HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
 2.2.STRATEGIES TO EXPLOIT LITERATURE IN THE
ENGLISH CLASS.
 3. TYPES OF STORYBOOKS
INTRODUCTION
 Teaching English does not simply consist of instructing our
students in the development of linguistic skills, but it deals
with HAVING COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENT
STUDETS.
 Effective communication inlcudes also development of sociocultural aspects.
 In this topic we will concentrate only on LITERATURE and
its introductiion in the ESL class.
2. PERIODS, AUTHROS AND GENRES SUITABLE TO
BE USED IN THE ENGLISH CLASS.
THE POSITION OF LITERATURE IN ESL.
BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURAY
THE GRAMMAR-TRANSLATION METHOD PLACED LITERATURE
IN A PRIVILIGED SITUATION.
MID OF THE 20TH CENTURY
WITH THE DEVELOPMENT OF STRUCTURALISM, LITERATURE
WAS DOWNGRADED TO A SECOND POSITION IN LANGUAGE
TEACHING,
70-80 OF THE 20TH CENTURY
COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH KEPT ON REFUSING LITERATURE
90-S OF THE 20TH CENTURY
NOT UNTIL THE RECENT TIMES THAT THE TEACHERS INCLUDED
LITERARY TEXTS IN THEIR CLASSES.
2. BRIEF HISTORICAL BACKGROUND.
2.1.MIDDLE AGES
1. CHAUCER´S CANTERBURY TALES
The plot: a group of people belonging to very diferent social stata who
go to Canterbury on piligrimage. They set off on an April morning with
the rain dripping from the branches, and in order to make the long
journey short they told each other stories.
Several adaptations for children are available.
THE CANTERBURY TALES
BY SELINA HASTINGS
This is a retelling of seven of Chaucer's "Canterbury
Tales", which aims to capture the spirit of the originals
while making them accessible to the young reader.
Animated adaptation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3zUoNG_P_0
 2. THE TALES OF ROBIN HOOD
 It was written in 1450 but still popular among the young learners.
 3. KING ARTHUR LEGENDS
 Thomas Malory´s Le Morte dArthur is a story of noble knights,
colourful tournaments and fateful love, set in a courtly society which
is outwordly secure and successful.
 An adaption of the legend was done in 1958 by Terence Handbury
White. This book was called THE ONCE A FUTURE KING. The
first part of the book (THE SWORD IN THE STONE) is the inspiration
of the Wal Disney´s movie (1963).
A masterful retelling of the saga of King
Arthur is a fantasy classic as legendary as
Excalibur and Camelot, and a poignant
story of adventure, romance, and magic
that has enchanted readers for
generations.
You can watch the whole legend here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oy6UQet5D0
2.2. RENAISSANCE PERIOD
 1.WILLIAM SHAKESPEAR
 Difficulties:
 Language: specific adaptations for children are available.
 Might seem boring: select attractive, motovating passages and
exploit them in entertaining way.
 Adaptations:
TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE by Charles and
Mary Lamb (1807)
The book reduced the archaic English and
complicated storyline to a simple level that
children could read and comprehend. However as it
noted in the Preface "his words are used
whenever it seemed possible to bring them in."
Hamlet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6
QUC0fu84uQ
Shakespeare:The Animated Tales
is a series of twelve half-hour
animated television adaptations of
the plays of William Shakespeare,
broadcast on BBC 2 between 1992
and 1994.
The show was both a critical and a
commercial success. The episodes
continue to be used in schools as
teaching aids, especially when
introducing children to Shakespeare
for the first time.
 2. CHARLES PERRAULT
Laid the foundations of the fairy tale in France.
Many of his tales were translated into English.
Little red Riding Hood with Miss Booksy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAyoE39cBvU
Cuentos interactivos:
http://www.cuentosinteractivos.org/mundoalreves/caperucita/caperucita.html
18TH CENTURY
 This is the period in which the novel appeared.
 Adventure stories and novels with young boys as protagonists
emerged.
 They were not intended for children, but traditionally
associated with children´s literature.
 DANIEL DEFOE
 HENRY FIELDING
 JONATHAN SWIFT
 1. DANIEL DEFOE´S ROBINSON CRUSOE
The topic of the novel quite
suitable for kids.
The novel tells the story of a
young Robinson Crusoe, a son
of a merchant who suffered a
shipwreck and is left alone on
the shore of an island. The rest
of the novel describes his
struggle for surviving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRscJGE1
3OA
 2. HENRY FIELDING´S TOM JONES
The plot is fairly basic and can be
presented to students to be familiarised
with the structure of the novel.
Tom Jones is an orphan, brought up by a
wealthy man, Allworthy. It causes jealousy
on the part of his nephew and heir Mr
Blifil. When Jones falls in love with Sofia,
daughter of a neighbour, Blifil’s calumnies
lead Allworthy to throw him out. After
some comic difficulties, everything end
happily.
 3. JONATHAN SWIFT´S GULLIVER TRAVELS.
 The novel will delight young lerners as it is full of adventure and fantasy.
 It is the most famous example of Swift´s satirical work.
 1st part
Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon on a merchant ship, relates his
shipwreck on the island of Lillput.
 2nd part
Gulliver is accidentally left ashore on Brobdingnag (the
inhabitants are as tall as steeps, and everything else is in proportion).
 3rd part
is occupied with a visit to the flying island of Laputa. Satire
against philosophers, men of science, historians.
v
 Gulliver's Travels (1939) - Full Movie
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6eyrmYRk1w
 Gulliver’s Travels
Swift’s evolution is paralleled by the hero’s progress in the novel
Lilliputans
The giants of
Brobdingang
The inhabitants of
Laputa
The Yahoos country
he becomes wary, slowly
awakening to their pride
and vanity
make him realize
corruption,
lost of pride and
self-esteem
human’s nature can’t be
reformed
Swift’s aversion to mankind
19TH CENTURY
 MARY SHELLY’S FRANKENSTEIN
 CHARLES DICKENS A CHRISTMAS CAROL
 OSCAR WILDE THE HAPPY PRINCE AND THE
NIGHTINGALR AND THE ROSE
 THE BROTHERS GRIMM and HANS CHRISTIAN
ANDERSEN
 LEWIS CARROLL ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN
WONDERLAND
 ROBERT LOIS STEVENSON TREASURE ISLAND
 RUDYARD KIPLING THE JUNGLE BOOK
 LOIS MARY ALCOTT LITTLE WOMAN
 MARK TWAIN THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER
 MARY SHELLY’S FRANKENSTEIN
 Stands a landmark because it portrays the modern man, the
modern Prometheus. Apart form this, the frightening
atmosphere and the different film adaptations make of the novel
an appealing tool to be used in the English classroom.
 Summary:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRppXdKDY_c
 CHARLES DICKENS A CHRISTMAS CAROL
 Is well known due to his ability to portray the suffering of the lower
classes in the Victorian England.
 A CHRISTMAS CAROL is a novel that can be exploited at Christmas
time in order to deal with celebrations in English speaking countries.
 Scrooge performs the role of an avaricious and heartless man,
showing no feeling for the Christmas spirit. After he is visited by the
ghost of his former business partner, ne sees visions of the past,
present and future that inspire him to become a better person.
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol 1971 Oscar Winner HD Richard Williams
Animation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTzyC9CZuOA
 OSCAR WILDE THE HAPPY PRINCE AND THE
NIGHTINGALR AND THE ROSE
 THE HAPPY PRINCE: tells the story of a prince’s statue who
gave his own jewels to help poor people.
 THE NIGHTINGALR AND THE ROSE: the nightingale gives
its own blood in order to provide the red colour to a rose that a
young boy wanted to give to his loved one.
 The Happy Prince - Bedtime Story Animation
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP7ESTU4Pxs
 THE BROTHERS GRIMM and HANS CHRISTIAN
ANDERSEN
 The Brothers Grimm - writing down and preserving oral
traditions in Germany:
 Snowhite
 Rapunzel
 Hansel and Gretel
 Hans Christian Andresen:
 The Little Mermaid
 The Snow Queen
 The Ugly Duckling
 ROBERT LOIS STEVENSON TREASURE ISLAND
 Wrote a classic pirate adventure novel.
 RUDYARD KIPLING THE JUNGLE BOOK
 A collection of stories about a boy who lives in the jungle with animals.
 MARK TWAIN THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER and
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN.
 A good tool for raising cultural awareness in students.
20 TH CENTURY
 L.FRANK BAUM THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ
 BEATRIX POTTER THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT
 KENNETH GRAHAME THE WIND IN THE WILLOS
 J.M. BARRIE PETER AND WENDY
 C.S. LEWIS CHRONICLES OF NARNIA
 TOLKIEN THE HOBBIT AND THE LORD OF RINGS
 ROAL DAHL CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
 J.K. ROWLING HARRY POTTER
 EOIN COLFER ARTEMIS FOWL
 L.FRANK BAUM THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ
(1900)
 It was the subject of a stage play in 1902 and a film in 1939.
 It is one of the best-known stories in American culture.
 The protagonist of the story tries to find her way back to Kansas. On her
way back she has to solve a set of problems.
 J.M. BARRIE PETER AND WENDY
 Peter pan magically refuses to grow up and spend his never ending childhood
in the small island Neverland.
 TOLKIEN THE HOBBIT AND THE LORD OF RINGS
 The Hobbit follows the quest of the home-loving Baggins to win a share of
the treasure guardered by the dragon, Smug.
 The Lord of Rings refers to the story’s main antagonist who had created the
One Ring to rule the other Rings of Power as the ultimate weapon in his
campaign to conquer and rule all of Middle-earth.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSzeFFsKEt4
21 century
 EOIN COLFER ARTEMIS FOWL (2001)
 Starring a teenage criminal mastermind named Artemis Fowl II. Artemis
Fowl is a ruthless and extremely intelligent young criminal whose main goal
is the acquisition of money through a variety of often illegal schemes.
 2.2.STRATEGIES TO EXPLOT LITERATURE IN THE ENGLISH
CLASS
 2.2.1. Educational and follow-up potential
 Learning English language and culture
 Learning about other subjects
 Learning about the world
 Learning how to learn
 2.2.2. Using storybooks in the classroom(Ellis, Brewster, 1991):
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Provide a context for the story and introduce the main characters
Provide visual support
Explain the context in mother tongue if necessary.
Identify your linguistic objectives.
Relate the story with other subject areas.
Decide in which order to introduce or revise the language necessary
for understanding the story.
Decide when you will read the story.
If necessary, modify the story to make it more accessible.
Include rhymes or songs to reinforce the story.
Decide about the follow/up activities.
 In order to exploit literature we need to develop some specific
strategies (Duff and Maley, 1999):
 Flexibility: any text can be approached in a different way
depending on the aspect you chose.
 Similarity: all texts have feature in common.
 Developing ides:
 Picture stories: the emphasis is on creation and transformation.
 Discussion activities: the emphasis is on the student’s personal involvement
with a topic.
 Specific strategies or procedures:
 Reconstruction: texts are incomplete or in a defective form.
 Expansion: to add given elements to a tetx.
 Replacement: remove certain elements and replace them by others.
 Matching: finding correspondences.
 Media Transfer.
 3. TYPES OF STORYBOOKS.
 3.1. Criteria for selecting storybooks.
 The texts should always be appropriate to the age, interests and
goals of our pupils.
 Pupils need to be able to read at a reasonable speed (200 words
per minute for extensive reading).
 With our youngest students we should use short, simple texts
with illustrations.
 3.2. Difficulties for the reader
LINGUISTIC DIFFICULTIES
STYLISTIC DIFFICULTIES
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
LINGUISTIC LEVEL
The vocabulary and
syntax of the text
should be within our
pupils’ grasp.
Idiomatic language
should be kept at a
minimum.
STYLISTIC LEVEL
It is useless to choose
texts of great stylistic
complexity for early
stages.
Style analysis should be based
on the linguistic features with
which our pupils are already
familiar.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The understanding of a text can also be
hindered by the lack of the background
knowledge of the English-speaking
countries culture.
Social conventions and customs, attitude and values,
religious and political ideas, geographical features, diet
and dress, historical background, etc.
 To use literature in the class:
 Pupils should be able to infer the meaning of the most unknown
words from the context.
 We must also bear in mind complex structure.
 If both sentence structure and vocabulary must be at a level they can
understand we won’t be able to use classic masterpieces.
 To find out if the text is suitable from the linguistic point of view we
can use a cloze test (Hill, 1986).
 Take an extract from the text and delete words from the passage
on a regular basis (al least 50 deletions). I
o More than 57% correct - pupils can read on their own
o Between 44 -57% - can read with the dictionary help.
o Below 44% - cannot read the text.
 3.2. Types of texts.
 Ellis and Brewster (1991) have classified the storybooks
under 3 headings:
 Narrative features
 Content
 Lay-out
 According to narrative features:
 Rhyming words
 Repeating structures
 Cumulative content and language
 Interactive
 Humorous
 According to content:
 Everyday life
 Animal stories
 Fairy tales
 Fantasy
 According to lay-out:
 Flap
 Cut-away pages
 Minimal text
 No text
 Speech bubbles
 3.2.1. Authentic vs. non-authentic texts
 The main text typology is the one that distinguishes between
authentic and non-authentic texts.
 Authentic material are those which have been produced
for purposes other than to tech language.
 A non-authentic text is the one that has bee designed
especially for language learners.
The question of levels
Naturally certain texts will lend themselves more easily to certain levels.
At lower levels some possibilities include leaflets, timetables, menus, short
headline type reports, audio and video advertising, or short news broadcasts.
The task should be simple and relatively undemanding, and it is important to
pre-teach key vocabulary so as to prevent panic.
At more intermediate levels this list could be expanded to include longer
articles, four or five minute TV or radio news reports, a higher quantity of
shorter items, or even whole TV programmes, if your copyright agreements
allow it. Again pre-teaching is important, although your students should be able
to deal with unknown vocabulary to some extent.
At higher levels it's a case of anything goes. At an advanced level students
should have some tactics for dealing with new vocabulary without panicking,
but it's still useful to have a few quick definitions to hand for some of the
trickier stuff!
Advantage and Disadvantages of Using Authentic
Materials
Advantages
 They have a positive effect on
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learner motivation.
They
provide
authentic
cultural information.
They provide exposure to real
language.
They relate more closely to
learners ' needs.
They support a more creative
approach
to
teaching.
Disadvantages
 Often too culturally biased,
difficult to understand outside
the language community.
 Vocabulary might no be
relevant to the student`s
immediate needs.
 Too many structures are
mixed so lower levels have
problems decoding the texts.
 Special
preparation
is
necessary, can be time
consuming.
Non-Authentic Material
Non-authentic materials are those that are specifically
designed for the language learners. They are either
adapted or simplified or written keeping in mind
the language proficiency of the learners in question.
Edited materials can be classified into simulated
authentic and artificial.
Simulated authentic texts are those that appear to
be a authentic.
 Artificial texts are made to illustrate a particular
language point.
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 To foster the acquisition of communicative
competence must at least be simulated authentic.