Gillian Lazar

Literature and Language Teaching; Exploring Literary Texts With the Language Learner

The TESOL Quarterlypublishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching. For this issue, we asked two educators to discuss the following question: What role can literature play in the ESL classroom? Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? from “The Tyger,” by William Blake (Heaney & Hughes, 1982)

Student-Centered Pedagogy and Real-World Research: Using Documents as Sources of Data in Teaching Social Science Skills and Methods.

This teaching note describes the design and implementation of an activity in a 90-minute teaching session that was developed to introduce a diverse cohort of first-year criminology and sociology students to the use of documents as sources of data. This approach was contextualized in real-world research through scaffolded, student-centered tasks focused on archival material and contemporary estate agents’ brochures so as to investigate changes in the suburbs that surround a university in north London. To contribute to the growing discussion on pedagogic dialogical spaces in teaching research methods, we provide empirical evidence of students’ greater engagement via group work and the opportunity to draw on experiential knowledge in analyzing sources. Beyond stimulating students’ engagement with research skills and methods, the data also show the value of our approach in helping students develop their analytical skills, particularly through a process of comparison and contrast.

Speaking the same language: Developing a language-aware feedback culture

Abstract Research suggests that feedback as part of assessment is often not delivered effectively. A key aspect of effective feedback delivery is that students need to understand feedback and also feel motivated to act on it. This article explores how educational developers can incorporate a language-aware approach to feedback when working with staff involved in learning and teaching in order to enable staff to make appropriate linguistic choices when providing feedback so that it is more comprehensible and motivational for students. It describes a piece of action research which explored and evaluated two teaching activities used on a PG Cert HE with staff at a post-1992 university, designed to promote critical awareness of the language used when giving feedback. We report on the staff evaluation of the activities devised and piloted, and consider how this project could be taken forward in future.

Playing with Words and Pictures: Using Post-modernist Picture Books as a Resource with Teenage and Adult Language Learners

In recent decades, there has been an upsurge of interest in the use of literary texts to promote English language learning in classrooms (see, for example, Carter and McRae, 1996; Duff and Maley, 1990; Hall, 2005; Paran, 2006; Parkinson and Reid Thomas, 2000). While much of the academic literature and many classroom materials have generally conceived of literary texts as poems, short stories, novels and plays, Paran (2006) argues that many classroom practitioners are making use of a much wider range of genres than previously, including fairy tales, popular songs, popular literature, autobiographical narratives and children’s literature. Children’s literature has either been integrated into teacher education programmes in order to develop both teachers’ linguistic competence and pedagogic skills (McNicholls, 2006; Martin, 2006), or been used with children to promote their language development, particularly in the case of picture books (Enever, 2006). While Ho (2000) makes the case for the value of using children’s literature in general with adult learners of English, the potential for using picture books with teenage and adult learners of English does not appear to have been considered. There are some obvious reasons for this.