ABSTRACT

Literature teaching remains central to the teaching of English around the world. This edited text brings together expert global figures under the banner of the International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE). The book captures a state-of-the-art snapshot of leading trends in current literature teaching, as well as detailing predicted trends for the future.

The expert scholar and leading teacher contributors, coming from a wide range of countries with fascinatingly diverse approaches to literature teaching, cover a range of central and fundamental topics:

  • literature and diversity;
  • digital literatures;
  • pedagogy and reader response;
  • mother tongues;
  • the business of reading;
  • publishers, adolescent fiction and censorship;
  • assessing responses to literature;
  • the changing definitions of literature and multimodal texts.

The collection reviews the consistently important place of literature in the education of young people and provides international evidence of its enduring value and contribution to education, resisting the functionalist and narrowly nationalist perspectives of misguided government authorities.

International Perspectives on the Teaching of Literature in Schools will be of value to researchers, PhD students, literature scholars, practitioners, teacher educators, teachers and all those in the extensive academic community interested in English and literacy around the world.

chapter |4 pages

Introduction

part I|72 pages

Ways of seeing, ways of teaching

chapter 1|11 pages

The literature teacher as restless cartographer

Pedagogies for cosmopolitan ethical explorations

chapter 2|11 pages

‘The dress of thought’

Analysing literature through a linguistic lens

chapter 4|11 pages

London in space and time

Peter Ackroyd and Will Self

chapter 5|13 pages

Beyond the personal and the individual

Reconsidering the role of emotion in literature learning

part II|97 pages

Readers, texts and contexts

chapter 9|12 pages

Rethinking literature ‘instruction’

An experiment with student-controlled pedagogy and Animal Farm

chapter 12|9 pages

poetry teaching in malta

The interplay between teachers’ beliefs and practices

chapter 13|11 pages

The social construction of meaning

Reading Animal Farm in the classroom

part III|67 pages

Rationales for teaching literature

chapter 16|19 pages

Reasons for reading

Why literature matters 1

chapter 17|15 pages

The teacher’s conundrum

Literature for adolescents in a standards-obsessed world

chapter 18|11 pages

Devolving English literature in schools

‘Non-standard’ approaches to the literature curriculum

chapter 19|10 pages

Creating readers

Improving the study of literature by improving recreational reading habits