Last month, I wrote about how to help your students analyze language. However, we’ve all read literary analysis essays that are mostly just a list of language features and their effects. To use this skill effectively, students need to be able to relate the language to the wider themes of the text and to theContinue reading “7 Tips for Using Background Knowledge to Improve Students’ Literary Analysis”
Tag Archives: Teaching Literature
How to Teach Your Students to Analyze Literary Devices
Are your students literary train-spotters? Do their text annotations mostly consist of the names of poetic devices? Do they have random sentences in their literary analysis essays where they mention that a quotation they’ve used contains a metaphor, without saying anything about how it works or why the author put it there? It’s one ofContinue reading “How to Teach Your Students to Analyze Literary Devices”
How to make any text relevant to your students using essential questions
The Relevance Trap It’s become the go-to question when English teachers are looking for new texts to teach: My students don’t read the books I used to assign. These old books don’t have anything to do with my students’ lives. They can’t see themselves in my usual texts. What new texts can I teach thatContinue reading “How to make any text relevant to your students using essential questions”
Beginning a unit with a preview text: Using the Amleth legend to introduce Shakespeare’s Hamlet
There’s a certain kind of student who loves to remind you that Shakespeare “stole” most of his stories from other sources, usually citing this as a reason why the bard isn’t so great after all. But this knowledge can also be used to a teacher’s advantage. I like to start off my teaching of HamletContinue reading “Beginning a unit with a preview text: Using the Amleth legend to introduce Shakespeare’s Hamlet”
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