While this website caters more to higher education teachers in the UK, I felt some of the activity ideas could well be adapted for use in secondary/JC classes here. The use of fairy-tales to teach key literary techniques and concepts, for instance, is effective as it makes use of very universal material to illuminate differences in more sophisticated literary styles and devices: the example given was rewriting an excerpt from “The Three Little Pigs” in different narrative voices. While this requires some creative input from the teacher during preparation, the differences in literary technique are immediately apparent, and the activity can also be extended by asking the students to do a similar exercise. On the other hand, the use of continuum lines to study texts, where the teacher generates lines linking opposing key words such as “literal” and “symbolic”, and asks students to position themselves along the continuum, could be useful in introducing ways of thinking about and comparing texts while motivating students to justify their perceptions. The website also offers some other more novel ideas, like “number-crunching” a text or making use of role-play to teach literary context, which might well be worth experimenting with.
-Ming See
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