Teaching English Language through Literature - Teacher Resources

Teaching Language and Literature

Teacher Resources: The Teaching of Language through Literature

* An Introduction: Teaching English Through Literature: Marut Hismanoglu 

* Using literature in the language classroom: The issues 

* Approaches to using literature with the language learner 

* Selecting and evaluating materials 

* Reading literature cross-culturally 

* Novels and Short stories: Materials design and lesson planning 

* Poetry: Materials design and lesson planning 

* Plays: Materials design and lesson planning 

* Reflecting on the literature lesson 

* Literature and Self­-Access Centre 

Above topics are taken from:

Literature and Language Teaching: A guide for teachers and trainers 

- by Gillian Lazar (1993, CUP)

Handouts - by Dr. Atanu Bhattacharya

Teaching Literature

Why teach literature for language classroom?

Theoretical Background: Historical Overview of Lit. Teaching in India:

1. The Origins
2. Literature teaching after Independence and the Present
3. What do we do to teach language through poetry?
4. What do we do to teach language through novels?
5. Teaching Literature: Using films or videos as support materials
1. Why use videos or films?
2. Role of the teacher
3. Role of the learner 

Check your progress:

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CONSTRUING CRITICALITY IN ESSAY GENRE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

CONSTRUING CRITICALITY IN ESSAY GENRE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Clément Ndoricimpa, Dilip P. Barad, "Construing criticality in essay genre in English literature", International Journal of English Learning and Teaching Skills; Vol. 2, No. 1; ISSN : 2639-7412 (Print) ISSN : 2638-5546 (Online)

URL: http://www.ijeltsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/64.-Construing-criticality-in-essay-genre-in-English-literature.pdf

Journal: http://www.ijeltsjournal.org/volume-2/

Abstract 

Criticality is established as one of most important characteristics of university essay genre. Students are required to demonstrate their critical thinking in their writing. However, criticality is a concept, which is less understood among students and tutors. Further, there is a little agreement among researchers on how to investigate the linguistic features associated with enacting critical stance. Therefore, this paper demonstrates how criticality is achieved in essay genre in the discipline of English literature. The argument in this paper is that the linguistic features traditionally associated with enacting criticality interact with other linguistic features to achieve critical stance in a written text. A systemic functional analysis of essays in English literature drawn from British Academic Writing English (BAWE) corpus demonstrates this interaction. Specifically, the findings show that the linguistic resources for the creation of ideational meaning interact with those for critical positioning to achieve critical thinking in university essays. These findings have implication for teaching academic writing in the discipline of English literature. 

Keywords: Academic writing, criticality, essay genre, stance

STUDENTS’ SELF-PERCEIVED PERFORMANCE IN ORAL PRESENTATION - A Case Study

ESL POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS’ SELF-PERCEIVED PERFORMANCE IN ORAL PRESENTATION: CASE OF MAHARAJA KRISHNAKUMARSINHJI BHAVNAGAR UNIVERSITY

Clement Ndoricimpa, Dilip P. Barad, "ESL Postgraduate Students' Self-Perceived Performance in Oral Presentation: Case of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University", International Journal of Management and Applied Science (IJMAS), Volume-5,Issue-9,pp 6-12 ,2019

IRAJ DOI Number -  IJMAS-IRAJ-DOI-16092

URL   -   http://www.iraj.in/journal/journal_file/journal_pdf/14-595-15738958056-12.pdf

Abstract

Oral presentation is one of the most important tools that is employed to assess learning at higher education. Students in many educational fields are required to make oral presentations. However, many students may find making oral presentations in front of peers and instructors challenging. In order to assess the extent to which students are able to make effective oral presentations, different frameworks are followed including self-regulated learning. In self-regulated learning, self- and peer assessments are used. Thus, this study investigates self-perceived performance among L2 postgraduate students in one University in India in order to determine their needs in oral presentations. The research employed mixed method design. Hence, the data were collected by means of self-assessment questionnaire and classroom observation. The data from self-assessment questionnaire were analyzed by means of descriptive statistics and were computed using the statistical package SPSS 22. The results revealed that students evaluated themselves a little above fairly on the whole in oral presentation. They believed that their non-verbal skills were below fairly, their abilities with regard to content were fairly and their verbal skills were above fairly. The results also indicated that students scored higher in peer assessment than in self-assessment and that there is no statistically significant difference in self-assessment with regard to gender and level of study. These results have implication for teaching and assessing oral presentation. Keywords - Assessment, Oral Presentation, Peer-Assessment, Self-Assessment, Self-Regulated Learning.

Cyberfeminism - AI and Gender Biases

Cyberfeminism: Artificial Intelligence and the Unconscious Biases

Cyberfeminism appeared in the 1980s and founded on the ideas post-humanist feminist thinker Donna Haraway expresses in her A Cyborg Manifesto. In this manifesto, she lays the groundwork for the concept of the internet being a revolutionary tool to overthrow patriarchy, destroy the existing gender binary and achieve feminist liberation. She sees the internet as a new neutral space women need to ally with and that needs to be shaped by women in a way that will allow them to overthrow the existing social order.

Cyberfeminism had grand ambitions for the internet; however, it failed to acknowledge that the internet does not necessarily represent a fresh start or a free space in which gender does not matter, but is a new space that is very much embedded in society, and that sexist, racist etc. assumptions are imported into the cyberspace. Online spaces and innovative technologies are human creations and therefore biased from their very creation. Nonetheless, although the internet and online technologies are an extension of society, replicating the same problems therein, and even if the platforms are somehow biased, it still represents a separate space for expression, which “negotiates the border” between our public and private lives (Harris, 2008, p.491). It presents opportunities for self-creation and reinvention of identity. This separate space, of course, also offers new opportunities for harassment, exacerbating certain types of behaviours because of the possibility for the perpetrator to hide behind the anonymity of the internet (Evans, 2015). All this leads us to the necessity of questioning the idea of space, safe space, and online versus offline identities and more importantly, to understanding the importance feminist activism online plays in shaping those safe spaces and identities. (Paula Ranzel)

Mia Consalvo defines cyberfeminism as:

1. a label for women—especially young women who might not even want to align with feminism's history—not just to consume new technologies but to actively participate in their making;
2. a critical engagement with new technologies and their entanglement with power structures and systemic oppression. (in "Cyberfeminism", Encyclopedia of New Media, SAGE Publications)

Bruce Grenville in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture mentions: "The dominant cyberfeminist perspective takes a utopian view of cyberspace and the Internet as a means of freedom from social constructs such as gender, sex difference and race. For instance, a description of the concept described it as a struggle to be aware of the impact of new technologies on the lives of women as well as the so-called insidious gendering of technoculture in everyday life.".

It has been proved in several researches that the unconscious biases are creeping in the coding of Artificial Intelligence also. Virtual world is nothing but mirror image of real world. The AI coders are also human beings. If these coders are unconsciously biased or are not made about their unconscious gender biases, the aritificial intelligence / machines / robots / algorithm made by them is bound to have similar biases. If this is not given serious consideration then the hope that people dreamt of, the world free of gender bias, will be lost, even in this digital era.

Here are some interesting observations made by these researchers:

1. Kirti Sharma: How to keep human bias out of AI?

Transcript

2. Robin Hauser: Can we protect AI from our biases?

Additional resources:

• Sarah Kamber - Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life - Routledge
• Kira Hall - Cyberfeminism - in Susan Herring edited 'Computer Mediated Communication'.
• Francesca Ferrando - 

  Is the post-human a post-woman? Cyborgs, robots, artificial intelligence and the futures of gender: a case study

• Josh Feast: 4 Ways to Address Gender Bias in AI
• Paula Ranzel: 

  How does online feminist activism offer the possibility for a truly intersectional feminist resistance?

• Carol Manton and Birgitte Aga: 

  Putting feminism into Artificial Intelligence

Knowledge Week 2020

Knowledge Week 2020

(Feedback form)

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University organised a week long Knowledge week from 3rd Feb to 8th Feb 2020. In this Knowledge Week, renowned speakers like Swami Dharmabandhuji, Dr, Anish Chandarana, Jay Vasavada, Dr. Jay Narayan Vyas, Swami Brahamavihari and Dr. Jagdish Trivedi interacted with students on topics like Youth and Nation, Health, Social Media, Economics, Human Values and Literature.

Knowledge Week 2020 from Dilip Barad

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Day 6:

Introduction to Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies

What is Cultural Studies?

Cultural studies, interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture. Cultural studies emerged in Britain in the late 1950s and subsequently spread internationally, notably to the United States and Australia. Originally identified with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (founded 1964) and with such scholars as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams, cultural studies later became a well-established field in many academic institutions, and it has since had broad influence in sociology, anthropology, historiography, literary criticism, philosophy, and art criticism. Among its central concerns are the place of race or ethnicity, class, and gender in the production of cultural knowledge. (Britannica  Brian Duignan).

Cultural studies is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts, and contingencies. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes.

Cultural studies was initially developed by British Marxist academics in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and has been subsequently taken up and transformed by scholars from many different disciplines around the world. Cultural studies is avowedly and even radically interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as antidisciplinary. A key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which socially organized people conduct and participate in the construction of their everyday lives. (Source: Click to read more).

Four Goals of Cultural Studies

1. Cultural Studies transcends the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history.
2. Cultural Studies is politically engaged.
3. Cultural Studies denies the separation of 'high' and 'low' or elite and popular culture.
4. Cultural Studies analyzes not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.

Five Types of Cultural Studies

1. British Cultural Materialism
2. New Historicism
3. American Multiculturalism
4. Postmodernism & Popular Culture
5. Postcolonial Studies

Cultural Studies in Practice

• Reading 'Hamlet' - Two Characters: Marginalization with a Vengeance
• Reading 'To His Coy Mistress - Implied Culture versus Historical Fact
• Reading 'Frankenstein' - From 'Paradise Lost to Frank-N-Furter: The Creature Lives!
• I. Revolutionary Births
• II. Frankenpheme in Popular Culture
• Reading 'Writer & Market' - Hawthorne, Chetan Bhagat & their Markets

 Limitations of Cultural Studies

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Check your progress - online test

• Online Test 1: What is Cultural Studies? and Four Goals of Cultural Studies
• Online Test 2: Five Types of Cultural Studies
• Online Test 3: Cultural Studies in Practice [Hamlet and To His Coy Mistress]
• Online Test 4: Cultural Studies in Practice [Frankenstein and Author & the Market]

Points to Ponder

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