15.2 EL Teaching Issues (Meera)

One of the issues that I encountered during TP was that students did not find their recommended texts engaging. This was an important issue because we had a LangLit programme in our school. One of the stories revolved around a South African woman and a journey in her car. Because the context was as far-reaching as it could possibly be and they could not appreciate the nuances of the text, they could not relate to the text nor were motivated to learn.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of their tasks was to write an autobiography. The sample assigned to them was an autobiography of a woman in her 30s, looking back at her life. I could not possibly imagine how a classroom of 40 teenaged boys could relate to that. I scoured the web for other more fitting examples that would also serve the objectives of the lesson but I failed to find any. Eventually, I wrote a narrative from scratch about a University student who is recollecting his days in Primary and Secondary school and reminiscing on how he had to balance sports and school. The students took to it and enjoyed discussing it in class. It also worked because the school I taught in had a strong affiliation with rugby.

Another issue was a lack of multimodal texts available to the students. This meant I had to once again rake the internet. Eventually, I settled on clips from V for Vendetta which the students absolutely loved. I used a speech as a starter activity and the next lesson, I found a student trying to read a library copy of the graphic novel, V for Vendetta. I started to wring the clips for all it was worth to teach vocabulary, adjectives and the bonus points that provocative statements make in persuasive writing! I also used a clip from “Stranger than Fiction” for the same purposes.

I would definitely add audiovisual materials into the mix during lessons. For me, the importance of selecting materials that ensure Learner-centeredness and Contextualisation are some of the key takeaways I received from these lessons.