1. General
2. Basic Tools/ Methods
3. Celebratory Literature Study
4. MOOC
5. Comic Strip
6. OTT – Students’ Seminar

General

Teaching is considered to be a very noble profession. We teachers are credited with creating impressionable minds. These minds are the future of any nation. My teachers in school taught English language and literature in a traditional way using white chalk and Blackboard method. Some of them were fantastic storytellers, a trait that I am yet to master. It was during my University days that I have come across teachers employing various methods of teaching English that are not only novel but also exciting to participate too. Now, when I am one, it is imperative that I chose novel methods in teaching English to the impressionable young minds.

But, nowadays, it is difficult for me to teach English language and literature based solely on textbook or chalk & board method. It is observed that holding students’ attention for a longer period of time is very difficult. It is very difficult for me teach students for a longer duration. Hence, it becomes imperative to teach English with a variety of methods so that students don’t lose touch with the subject. I have employed some methods to teach English language and literature. This blog is my record of the same.

Basic Tools/ Methods

Kahoot and Mentimeter are the two online platforms for better teaching. I was introduced to Mentimeter during my coursework for PhD in the year 2018. I came to know about Kahoot and other online platforms through the British Council’s online course viz. How to Plan a Great Lesson. I used this first in the month of June 2019 BBA students & July 2019 to the communication club students of PGDM.

Kahoot is the one platform that is not only easy to use but also I have students enjoying it the most. It is filled with lots of activities that are based on games that are actually nothing but quizzes in different formats. What I do is, I try to formulate questions based the themes of the short stories, poems or plays given in the students’ textbooks. There are different formats of quizzes that can be made use of.

Mentimeter platform took a lot of patience from my side to make it work in the classroom. I have found students not liking it much. Though, the Word Cloud feature of mentimeter is my favourite. Teachers can take inputs from students and mentimeter arranges those words beautifully as a cloud. Being an English teacher it is wonderful to see words arranged in an interesting way.

Role Plays are an interesting way to teach or make students understand a scenario fictionally. I have encouraged students to enact role plays. The focus here was to make students understand the intricacies of the characters in a story. They were given the freedom to tweak the stories in a sensible way. They had their own interpretations of the short stories given in the texts. Their versions are an interesting take of life. Students later converted these role plays as Drama in Videos.

“Ma’am, most of the chapters in English textbooks are so boring and some of them we have already learnt in our school days.”

The above statement was the usual dialogue I had to and still do listen from my students. Is the problem with the textbook makers or creators that the students are bored? Let’s not take students’ point of view currently and instead focus from teacher’s point of view. Why can’t we repackage our teaching style?

Celebratory Literature Study

During the course of my teaching I realized that students from the science and commerce background do not realize the depth of English Literature. They believe that English Literature is either Shakespeare or British and American Literature. This is far removed from truth. There are different types of literature in the vast ocean of English Literature. I want my students to see, observe, taste and be aware of some of them. This made me scratch my head a lot and led to the new way of making students know about Halloween Literature , Christmas Literature and Indian Cultural Studies. I gave the name – Celebratory Literature Study to this style of teaching. The name itself is self explanatory.

I wanted students to be aware that the theme of Halloween, Christmas and Indian Cultural Studies is not only observed in movies but also in short stories, novels, comics, etc. For this, I told students that we will celebrate the “theme such as Halloween, Christmas & Indian Cultural Representations” and “its application on the literary field”. The days coinciding or nearing with the celebrations of Halloween, Christmas and Republic days were chosen for the same. I had a deep and effective discussions with the students. From the discussions, I decided to make them a class level event planned in accordance with my regular timetable with them that is conducting the events during the Generic English hour.

I made students create posters, schedules, organize activities tapping literature such as Quiz, Best Costume Icon(featuring authors/poets), Videos(Halloween & Christmas short story videos), Treasure Hunt with questions featuring from movies, folk tales and music across the world(these constitutes Cultural Studies), Secret Santa (traditional game), making reels on different folk traditions in India, etc. All these activities ensured that students not only enjoy but also get familiarized with the varieties of English Literature.

MOOC

I came to know about MOOC in the year, 2013. As part of the Literary Criticism & Contemporary Critical Studies subject that I had to study in the first year of MA in English with Communication Studies, we had to study an online course titled as The Camera Never Lies on the Coursera Platform. The marks obtained from the course were taken into consideration for the overall Semester marks. There were numerous such courses which I did since then.

The full form of MOOC is Massive Open Online Course. There are many platforms available for MOOCs. Some of them are Cousera, FutureLearn, Swayam, Udemy, Khan Aademy, EDX, etc. The best part of MOOCs is that you can access the latest subject and learn from the experts from any part of the world. Though it is largely self-driven, the variety of courses available to learn in MOOCs are interesting.

I wanted the students to go through the experience that I had through MOOCs and make them aware that there are many interesting courses that could be learnt through various platforms. I had observed that most of the students didn’t have the basic knowledge to go about with seeking information for academic purposes. Therefore, I made them enroll for a course titled as Academic Information Seeking offered by University of Copenhagen available in Coursera. The marks obtained through the course was added to their Bangalore University Internal marks out of 5.

Comic Strip

Students don’t appreciate doing assignments in general. I thought why not make it interesting. In one of the Faculty Development Programs that I attended last year introduced the notion of making students create a comic strip based on the text being taught to them. This seemed interesting to me. I had personally never done the same though have attempted in creating comic cartoons in notebooks along with friends during my classes as a student.

It was not an easy assignment to give to students. I had to explain multiple times. Students were told to use a laptop in general though most of them preferred mobile and some of them used tablet to access the Canva website. There are multiple options available in Canva for design. I had instructed students to use specifically comic strip template. They were told to take any scene from the short story taught in class and convert it into a comic strip. This assignment was given to 1st year Generic English BCom students and 2nd Year Additional English BBA & BCom students. The short stories that were converted into comic strips were Katherine Mansfield’s The Doll’s House and Hillaire Belloc’s A Conversation with a Reader.

OTT – Students’ Seminar

As part of student development activities, I had organized a student’s seminar. This was a class based activity. The topic given was OTT i.e. Over The Top Shows. The class were divided into groups. Each group chose one English language based OTT Show and gave a presentation on it. The objective of this activity was to assess and assist the class in developing one’s presentation skills. Students literally took this activity on a different level. Some of them dressed like the characters from the OTT Show, Squid Game, some of them performed scenes and some others danced and even sketched apart from their regular presentations. It was a refreshing presentation for me as a teacher.

Penned by – Livea Thekkekara Paul works as an English Lecturer at International School of Management Excellence, a leading private B-school in Bengaluru, India.