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0:00:03

[Will Rixon]

Well, welcome Chiara. Thanks very much for putting yourself forward.

[Chiara Bruzzano]

Thank you.

[Will Rixon]

So Beyond Shakespeare: 15 Ideas to Use Literature Creatively in the Classroom. You're a reader, is that fair to assume?

[Chiara Bruzzano]

Ah, yeah, yeah, I am.

[Will Rixon]

So is that, that's generally, is that why you put this particular talk forward? You're passionate about Reading literature, fiction stories.

[Chiara Bruzzano]

So funny story. I am passionate about reading literature in my native language, but my interest in this topic really stems from my hatred of reading literature in foreign languages, which comes from when I was in high school and I was made to read literature and I didn't really enjoy it.

And then as I became a teacher and a teacher educator, I thought, well, maybe we can do a bit better.

[Will Rixon]

Okay, fair enough. Good stuff. You're a teacher educator and researcher. And you contributed to the professional development of more than 12,000 teachers.

00:01:07

[Chiara Bruzzano]

Who are these 12,000 teachers? Italian teachers for the most part. I work in England right now, but kind of online, I work with Italian teachers of English. I've got a newsletter, I've got online courses, I've got Brilliant.

[Will Rixon]

Good stuff, Chiara. Well, I'm going to leave you to it. Have a great talk. I'll see you in about 15 minutes or so.

[Chiara Bruzzano]

Thank you very much. Let me share my screen. Okay, lovely. Can you see my screen?

[Will Rixon]

Almost there. There we are.

[Chiara Bruzzano]

Yes, there we are. Okay. Thank you, Will, and welcome everybody to this talk, which is entitled Beyond Shakespeare: 15 Ideas to Use Literature Creatively in the Language Classroom.

00:02:04

Honest disclaimer: you might think from the title of my talk that I am a literature aficionado and a bookworm, and I am, but this used to be me when I was a teenager and I was made to study literature in English. I couldn't really get into it. I struggled with it, and that is what my interest in this topic stems from as a teacher, and that's what led me to write a whole course about this topic. Before we start, though, let me ask you a quick question. If you can put this in the chat, where are you on the Shakespeare owning term?

So on a scale from 0 to 10, how often do you use literature and why? What is the situation in your school or institution? Do you have to use it? Do you not? Tell me a bit.

00:03:00

So I'm seeing a few numbers, a few zeros, a 5, a 3. Yeah.

Okay. Tell me why. I don't mean to sound like a Backstreet Boy here, but tell me why. Love reading it, but I don't use it much with students. It's not needed.

Yeah, so in some contexts, literature is compulsory, really. It has to be taught, and in others it doesn't. Too little time in class. That's absolutely fair. Working in companies that use business English, yes, wouldn't be irrelevant.

Ah, very good point. I love literature, but I can't get my students interested. It's too difficult. Very good. Very good.

Very relevant to what we're going to discuss today. Hopefully you will find ideas to make literature accessible for your learners. Our starting point for today is that literature can mean many things in the classroom. It can be used to study literature. That's the more traditional way, or it can be used as a resource.

00:04:13

Study literature, meaning literary analysis, for example, learning to identify literary devices, learning about the author, the historical context, but it can also be used as a resource for students to experience and interpret texts, but also, and that's why it's in bold, it's really important, it can be used as a resource to learn the language. And today we're going to look at activities that tackle all of these 4 purposes. When we say literature, do we mean canon, your Shakespeare, your Brontë, your Wilde, or non-canon? I believe it's both. I believe we can bring all sorts of texts into the classroom.

00:05:01

I believe we can involve our learners in the decision as well. So don't think that this talk is all about teaching Shakespeare essentially, because we're going beyond Shakespeare. And graded or non-graded, and this is a big obstacle sometimes, and it was for me, understanding what on earth the author is saying. And sometimes the language really makes it too difficult. Is it compulsory that we have to use the non-graded authentic text?

No, it isn't. And many non-graded— and many graded, sorry, sources exist that make literature really more accessible for different levels. Okay, so that is what we're going to talk about today, and our activities, the 15 activities, are going to span between poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. So we'll do a bit of everything. We're going to be looking, broadly speaking, at activities to stimulate our learners' interest, activities to engage with the text, and activities to transform the text.

00:06:12

Let's get stuck in, shall we? Okay, first activity to stimulate our learners' interest before we start looking at a particular novel or a particular literary work. We show different versions of book covers and we ask our learners to speculate on the content. I also quite like doing this with translated versions of the book, especially in the learner's L1. If you happen to teach a monolingual class or a class in which learners share a language, they start speculating what might be the content before they start learning about the content.

Gallery walk, my second activity, a bit of a kinesthetic element. I'll give you a moment to have a quick look at these 3 poems. Can you tell me what kind of poetry this is? Maybe somebody has already stumbled on it.

00:07:24

Okay.

Futuristic shape poetry. We're almost there. Yeah, so it's visual poetry. As you can see, the shape really is used to convey part of the meaning.

What I've done quite a few times is print off some poems from the same author. Stick them around the classroom. The learners walk around, they read the poems, and they stand next to the one that they like the most, and they have to justify their choice. Speaking. This adds obviously an element of engagement and movement as well, and it's a nice way of introducing poems by the same author or poems from the same sort of literary movement or time period.

00:08:16

Another activity to stimulate learners' interest, a biographical montage. You put together a few pictures about the biography of an author before you introduce the author, and you get learners to guess who the author is. Can you guess who this author is? I would think you would. Let's have a Look at the chat.

We've got a Brontë. Yes, yes, it is a Brontë indeed. Which Brontë? Charlotte. It could be any Brontë.

It could be any Brontë. It could be any Austen. It could be anybody really, as long as you put in pictures that are relevant to the life and also the works potentially of that author. And this is something that students can do themselves. Okay, I also quite like to do a gapped biography running dictation.

00:09:16

Now, this is a gapped biography, very short, of course, and you can tailor it to the learner's level of Charlotte Brontë. You can do it as a gap fill, of course, in pairs and groups, but also as a running dictation. So you print the gapped biography, You stick a few copies around the room, then you put your learners in pairs, or perhaps in groups if you've got a big group, and in each pair or group there's one designated runner. They have to run to the text, memorize as much as they can, come back and whisper it to the rest of the group so they can write it down and try to fill in the gap.

This way, obviously, it's slightly more engaging, perhaps, than doing it sitting at a table. And also, you can tailor this if you want more of a language element. You can tailor it to include structures or vocabulary that you want to work on. And finally, an activity you might know as a getting-to-know-you activity, 3 Truths, 1 Lie. That is really difficult for me to pronounce.

00:10:28

3 truths, 1 lie, but about our friend Oscar Wilde. Now take a moment. Which one is the lie?

Can you tell me in the chat?

Hmm, I've got a 4.

Number 1. Number 2. Ah, we've got a few. Ah, okay. So I've got a few guesses here.

The elaborate clothes is actually true. Number 1 is unfortunately true. Number 4 seems in character for Wilde, but it's actually not true. Okay. Quite an easy one to put together.

Students can do it themselves by looking up the biography and then putting this together. Together. Creative gap fill, an activity to engage with the text. This is 'Still I Rise' by Maya Angelou. Here I've decided to gap some things that rhyme.

00:11:33

I've given some options here, but you can also leave it more open-ended. And here the students can focus really on things like rhyme and rhythm if you want more of a literary focus. And it's interesting to see what they come up with. A reaction task. This kind of links back a bit to the idea of metacognition as well, because reading a poem especially, but not only, is an experience.

So you can do a reaction task. Read the poem once. You've got a bit of time and answer these questions at the end. How did I feel? What did I struggle with?

What else would I like to know? Read it again. Answer the questions again. How does your experience change?

Blackout poetry. Have you ever seen this? This is an example based on a book by Robert Louis Stevenson. You take a text, you give your learners a text, and they black out a big part of the text so that what is left is a poem. You can give them examples first and then they can do it themselves.

00:12:47

And I think the result is quite beautiful, in fact, and quite creative.

It demystifies poetry a bit as well. Engaging with the text. Some of my absolute favourite activities are rewriting a story or part of a story, for example, from a character's point of view. So Orwell's 1984, but from Julia's perspective. How does it change?

Does it become a manual, survival manual, for example? Changing key details of a character. Hamlet, but if Hamlet were a woman, how would things change?

00:13:26

Rewriting the story, but as if set in the present day. For example, Pride and Prejudice, but in 2026. And for example, some of my students came up with the characters meeting on WhatsApp or some other, I don't know what it was, Snapchat, something ridiculous like that. But it does prompt obviously discussions about the values and how values change. Pride and Prejudice involves a whole host of other themes.

Changing key events. So Frankenstein, but the monster is not abandoned after being created. He is taken in and nurtured. How does the story change? This really fosters the students' creativity.

00:14:55

Rewrite a story, but with your own choices. And I think we can probably agree Romeo was a bit, not wrong in the choices he made, but he could have thought about them a little bit more thoroughly, you would think. I also like using these kinds of memes or kind of puns and jokes to do with literature. So because they are very powerful, they pack a lot of content into actually just one image and only a few words. So they're also fairly easy to decode.

So rewrite a story, but with your own choices. What would you have done instead? Okay.

And activities to transform the text into a different genre. So this works particularly well with short stories or novels where the learners, or plays where the learners already know the plot. So in the case, for example, of Evelyn by Joyce, you take the short story and dramatise. A scene, so the learners would write the actual dialogue, which pushes them obviously not only to produce language but also to identify with the characters, imagine what they might be saying, and again, it's a creative activity, and then they dramatise and they play their roles. Finally, activity to transform the text.

00:15:55

Into the visual representation of the text. This is an example of where I don't use canon. This is a Game of Thrones web of betrayals. Not sure if you're familiar, but it is a very complicated text, and so learners can take that text and summarize it using, using these visual means. Another good example.

I absolutely love this one. Icon-based diagram. What story is this? Look at it and let's see who can guess it in the chat.

00:16:45

I don't have any takers so far. Okay, Romeo and Juliet, excellent, Olga. Yes, so just your typical icons, it could be emojis, it could be icons, and it's Romeo and Juliet, or something like this, an infographic, main characters, plot summary, death toll's a bit chocolatey, yes, but again, they use their skills to visually represent it. Oh, sorry. And that's the end of my presentation.

Thank you so much for attending. Here's links to my course on using literature, my LinkedIn, my email. I love staying in touch. I also write a newsletter with a lot of these ideas. I forgot to put it on here.

I'll just put a link in the chat. And these are some references if you want to learn more. Okay, but you'll get all of the slides and the recording after this event.

00:17:42

[Will Rixon]

Thank you so much, Chiara. Wonderful.

[Chiara Bruzzano]

Thank you, Will.

[Will Rixon]

Absolutely wonderful.

[Chiara Bruzzano]

Thank you.

And thanks, everybody. I'm going to put this related email sheet. Okay. Here we are.

[Will Rixon]

Great. Yes, please do. Everyone have a look at that. Chiara's website.

[Chiara Bruzzano]

Yeah, it's a newsletter. It's free.

It comes out every Sunday-ish.

[Will Rixon]

What sort of things? What sort of things are you newslettering about?

00:18:11

[Chiara Bruzzano]

I newsletter a lot about, it's been going on for 6 years already, so I've written a lot of stuff, but people seem to still want to bear with me. So it's teaching strategies, teaching tips, my stuff about living in England and how weird it is sometimes.

Wonderful. But yeah, mostly about teaching. Yeah.

[Will Rixon]

Okay, great. Thank you for sharing, Chiara.

[Chiara Bruzzano]

Thank you.

[Will Rixon]

Okay. Well, have a lovely rest of your day, Chiara. We'll see you again soon.