TEACHING UNIT

The Teaching Unit could be addressed to students in their last year of a Liceo whose average level of English should be upper intermediate. The general aim of the activities suggested in the Unit, which take about five hours to be carried out, is to develop the students’ skills in analysing the ‘writing process’ hidden in a piece of good literature and exploit it in a creative and interactive way.  

ANTICIPATION. brainstorming (10 minutes)

The teacher writes the title of the short story on the blackboard and asks the students to express their own expectations freely. All the conjectures they make should be written around the title in a rose of  words. Of course, it is essential for the technique to work out that no one already knows the plot.

The aim of this activity is to arouse the students’ curiosity towards the text they are going to read and analyse.

STEP 1. Reading as a psycholinguistic game (2 hours)

Students are  given the first paragraph of the short story. They are asked to read it silently and to continue the story for more or less the same length. The students are told that what matters is not to guess the right sequel of the story( the ‘game’ part of the exercise) but to collect as many  hints as possible for a further development of the plot. Then, everybody reads his/her own paragraph aloud and the teacher gives value to what each student has written. After sharing their piece of creative writing , the students are given the authentic paragraph for a brief comparison ( they usually find out to what extent the writer has shown to be unpredictable by working out a deflation of expectations).

Students are asked to follow the same procedure for all the paragraphs in the story.

When the last paragraph is given , they are told that it is the last but one paragraph. They creatively write their conclusion to the short story, but this time it is the teacher to deflate their expectations: they are not going to get the original conclusive paragraph to compare to the one they have just written simply because it does not exist.

STEP 2. Intensive Reading (2 hours)