ABSTRACT
The creation of beautiful literature and art is one of humanity's most essential endeavours. The importance of literature as a component of the language-teaching curriculum has fluctuated over the last century with the popularity of various language-teaching pedagogies. Notwithstanding, it has recently seen a resurrection of appreciation for its effective utility in language acquisition. Covid-19 lockdown combined with the further progress of computer-assisted language learning has led to a gradual shift in the provision of literature-based language education to an online setting. Under this trend, Sandra Stadler-Heer and Amos Paran's edited chapter book Taking Literature and Language Learning Online: New Perspectives on Teaching, Research and Technology concentrates on a particular component of this transfer process, namely the interaction between literature and language learning. This book review provides an overview of this volume.
ABSTRACT
Despite the severe social, health, political and economic impacts of the outbreak of Covid-19 on Palestinians, we contend that one positive aspect of this pandemic is that it has revealed the perils and shortcomings of the teacher-centered, traditional education which colonizes students' minds, compromises their analytical abilities and, paradoxically, places them in a system of oppression which audits their ideas, limits their freedoms, and curtails their creativity. While Israeli occupation has proven to be an obstacle in the face of the Palestinian government's attempt to combat and contain the Corona crisis, on-line education, the sole arena that escapes this colonial system, has forced many instructors to give up their domination over the process of education and to create a more collaborative atmosphere of education that is based on dialogue, research and flexibility of the curriculum content. This study is designed to gauge English literature students' responses to this mode of digital learning. We interviewed a hundred students from six English literature programs between March and August, 2020. Thus, through critically examining students' answers, and by drawing on Freire's concepts of banking education, consciousness and dialogue, we propose that online education is an important step towards the decolonization of education and a call for a paradigm shift on the account that the existing paradigm of traditional education is stifling students' creativity and critical thinking.
ABSTRACT
This book charts the publishing industry and bestselling fiction from 1900, featuring a comprehensive list of all bestselling fiction titles in the UK. This third edition includes a new introduction which features additional information on current trends in reading including the rise of Black, Asian and LGBTQIA+ publishing;the continuing importance of certain genres and up to date trends in publishing, bookselling, library borrowing and literacy. There are sections on writing for children, on the importance of audiobooks and book clubs, self- published bestsellers as well as many new entries to the present day including bestselling authors such as David Walliams, Peter James, George R R Martin and far less well known authors whose books s sell in their thousands. This is the essential guide to best-selling books, authors, genres, publishing and bookselling since 1900, providing a unique insight into more than a century of entertainment, and opening a window into the reading habits and social life of the British from the death of Queen Victoria to the Coronavirus Pandemic. © Clive Bloom 2002, 2008, 2021. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Stephens uses Shakespeare to address societal problems. Teaching William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet's relevance to struggling readers is challenging. Like Kelly Gallagher's argument that struggling writers do not do enough writing, she thinks struggling readers suffer from similar failures: teachers do not do enough reading with students. Like Gallagher, she believes it is best to focus on what teachers can control. So, when she was required to teach Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to her ninth graders last year, she paused to reflect on undertaking this task with struggling readers while making the text accessible and meaningful. Here she describes her attempt to meet this task.
ABSTRACT
This study aims to show how formative assessment that is assisted by technology can improve student learning in English literature courses in higher education. Moreover, it explores how the use of technology could help implement formative assessment by the instructors to assure student learning in English literature courses in an efficient and timely manner. Formative assessment is somewhat new for higher education instructors, especially those who teach English literature. Applying this type of assessment is, unfortunately, not easy and the results are not always ideal. Nevertheless, to reach the goals of the study, a quantitative method is distributed to 50 English literature instructors from higher educational institutions that recently started implementing technology in their formative assessments. The significance of the study lies in the fact that the study is conducted in a region where formative assessment has recently been used in education, specifically in higher education English literature courses. The contribution also lies in how technology can help implement formative assessment, overcome any obstacles, and thus ensure student learning. The findings of the study show significant awareness of formative assessment in higher education, and especially among instructors of English literature. The findings also indicate that implementing technology with formative assessments enhances students' learning in English literature course in higher education after COVID-19. © 2023 by authors;.
ABSTRACT
I teach Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in an undergraduate English literature course on "Survival Narratives of the Eighteenth Century" at the University of California, Davis. The aim of this course is to show how significant perilous voyages were to the ways in which writers in eighteenth-century Britain imagined and interpreted their world. The course draws from the burst of new scholarship on rethinking the traditional "rise of the novel" narrative in imperial, oceanic, and global contexts and develops interpretive frameworks for the eighteenth century's changing relationship to commerce and exploration. Wollstonecraft's travelogue is the final text in a syllabus that begins with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and continues with Phillis Wheatley's poetry about ocean voyages and Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). Wollstonecraft's account of traveling in Scandinavia, written in the aftermath of the French Revolution, is more concerned with the survival of the human species than the survival of the individual. But reading Wollstonecraft's travelogue in a course on survival narratives primes students to understand how the material conditions of reading and writing-often taking place under extreme circumstances-shaped the literature being produced in the eighteenth century. In this essay, I describe a metacognitive exercise in which students reflected on Wollstonecraft's meditation on survival in an era of environmental catastrophe with their own "travelogues" written from where they logged into the Zoom classroom. With classes online at the time due to COVID-19, many of my students drew on this lesson to discuss how a moment of crisis shaped their skills and experiences as writers.
ABSTRACT
During the Covid-19 pandemic situation, the English literature learning and assessment have moved from classroom form to online form. This study emphasizes on the challenges of online English literature learning and students' experience and expectation regarding online English literature course assessment in private universities of Bangladesh. English literature students were invited to participate in the survey and 326 students from 10 private universities partook. Students dwelling in towns and villages addressed their problems what they experienced while attending online literature class and assessment. Previous researches shed light on abrupt transit to online education in different countries including Bangladesh, voices and views of teachers and students of English and other departments, even on language courses, but none of them addressed the situation English literature students of private universities undergo during the pandemic of Covid-19, which stopped on-sight education across the globe. This paper determines to elaborate the challenges, experience, expectation and overall voices of English literature students from private universities of Bangladesh regarding online literature class and assessment. This qualitative research labels students' exact problems and recommendation which will help minimize the loss of students' learning, thus, will benefit the students of English literature of Bangladeshi private universities. The findings will also assist the instructors to overcome the challenges of online English literature teaching and assessment.
ABSTRACT
The explores the impact of using both ADDIE Model, which stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation, as an instructional design and UDL in planning for English Literature Online courses during COVID-19 in higher education from the perspective of the students. Up to the researcher's knowledge, no prior studies have been conducted to explore the effect of the use of ADDIE model and UDL in online English Literature courses for graduate students in universities or other forms of higher education from the perspective of the students. A quantitative approach was used for collecting the data, where a four-part questionnaire was distributed to 90 students, who were randomly chosen from the students of a group of English Literature professors from different public and private universities in Jordan, who were asked to plan for their online English Literature courses through integrating both the ADDIE model, with its principles of Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation, and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) with its principles of Engagement, Representation, Action and Expression. As a conclusion, the study shows the positive impact of using both ADDIE Instructional Design Model and UDL in English Literature Online courses on the students' performance from the perspective of the students.
ABSTRACT
The Covid 19 pandemic has caused problems and progress in learning. Issues related to the online learning process are faced by educators related to technology use. On the one hand, due to the demands of the situation, the online learning process during the pandemic led to progress in learning using technology. One of them is by using a blog. This study aims to find out students' attitudes related to learning literature by using blogs. 79 students in the English Literature study program, Faculty of Art and Education at The University of Teknokrat Indonesia, were the samples in this study. Some of the benefits of blogs were collected and students interpreted blogs positive. Higher response to the use of blogs as a medium to increase critical thought shows positive regarding the purpose of learning literature. The findings also show that there are several problems faced by students related to the use of blogs. However, the students are interested in developing argumentative skills in writing paper on blog and the internet as a medium of self-representation. © 2021 IEEE.
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As telehealth is a growing form of healthcare delivery across the world, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s impact on patient populations particularly in aboriginal and rural communities boasts many questions. As the health disparities between aboriginal groups living in rural areas on reserves and the rest of the Canadian demographics remain to be mountainous, telemedicine is often seen as the new way forward in reducing these healthcare gaps. Presently, much research has been conducted on these cohorts, particularly in the health equity atmosphere. However, much of this research lacks a comprehensive framework or tool in which it analyzes the efficacy of outcomes. In this review paper, the quadruple aim – the ideal standard of care which North American health systems seek to conform to – will be used to analyze telemedicine performance, and assert evidence-based recommendations for improvement. Therefore, this paper seeks to conduct a thematic analysis on the various issues and barriers to telemedicine delivery and usage in aboriginal populations with respect to the quadruple aim as well as identifying evidence-based solutions to alleviate some of these concerns and bolster care.
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Research related to reception studies on queer representation in fiction within higher education institutions (HEIs) is a vastly unexplored area in Sri Lanka. This study intends to fill the gap in existing research by prioritising the need to factor in receptors’ positions and practices in teaching and learning these works. This research aims to understand, deconstruct, and explore the varied positions and practices of receptors (lecturers and students) in the teaching and learning of a selected Sri Lankan English fiction, Funny Boy (1994) by Shyam Selvadurai at local universities. The contextual and pedagogical site selected includes three universities in the Western and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka. The methodology of the study incorporates a qualitative research design to conduct a reception analysis. The primary data collection methods are in-depth interviews with three lecturers and two students and a focus group discussion with three students. The findings of this research identify and analyse the frames of reference, pedagogies, approaches, and strategies involved in the teaching and learning of the selected fictional work. These enable the analysis of varied reception positions and practices to explore their possibilities of incorporating critical and queer pedagogies to ensure a transformative learning experience within HEIs.
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Generating countless websites, books, films, series, and podcasts, and encompassing nearly every major negative event that has taken place since the end of World War II, conspiracies have become a phenomenon that anyone as a citizen and thinking individual has had to cope with in the last few decades, arguably reaching a peak during the Trump presidency, with the rise of QAnon and various conspiracy theories about the current Covid-19 pandemic (Barkun 2017;Amarasingam and Argentino 2020;Mitchell et al. 2020;Uscinski et al. 2020). Not surprisingly, the rise of conspiracy theories has also coincided with an increasing scholarly interest, especially within psychology and the social sciences, although studies of conspiracies in literature and film have also grown in number during the last two decades. Just to mention two famous examples, the same Brown's Inferno (2013) draws upon the long-standing tradition of conspiracy theories related to Dante's Divine Comedy, and the works of William Shakespeare have been subjected to a long series of conspiratorial readings, arguably reaching a peak-at least in a Norwegian context-with Erlend Loe's and Petter Amundsen's mashup of theories about Shakespeare's persona and the coded messages that the English dramatist allegedly left in his texts (Loe and Amundsen 2006). Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's rejection of a fixed identity in late modern society and cultural production, she makes a clear argument against two main avenues of scholarly interpretation of the play, a Hegelian and Cartesian one: "I argue that Peer Gynt should be understood as expressing a fundamentally non-transcendent world-view" (Rees 2014, 13, 19). [...]according to Rees, Peer Gynt's status as a "national epos" is highly paradoxical, and the play hardly seems to contain a clear-cut "message" or to allow a straightforward interpretation, be it about cultural identity or otherwise.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has had serious implications on educational systems worldwide and, hence, online courses have been organized. It is expected that the use of online learning in higher education promote knowledge sharing among students and the sharing of knowledge result in the improvement of reflective thinking among them. As such, we examined the knowledge sharing behavior among the undergraduate students in online learning English literature courses, the student' perceptions towards reflective thinking, the relationship between the students' knowledge sharing and reflective thinking, and finally, we tested a structural model of factors affecting knowledge sharing components, knowledge sharing, and reflective thinking. The data were collected through two surveys of 104 Iranian English literature students. A Pearson's correlation coefficient and path analysis were used to analyze the data and to generate a model. The results showed that the students' online knowledge sharing behavior and their perceptions towards reflective thinking are at unacceptable levels. Furthermore, a significant relationship was found between factors affecting knowledge sharing with the students' knowledge sharing behavior, and between knowledge sharing and reflective thinking. The results also confirmed the mediator role of knowledge sharing and supported the hypothesized model of the relationships among the variables. Pedagogical implications of the study are finally discussed.
ABSTRACT
Shakespeare has always been the source of inspiration to the generations all over the world stage. Toufann by Dev Virahsawmy is one such piece of clone. The world has taken a drastic turn in the 21st century. Digitalisation is the only normal in abnormality of the millennials with the upsurge of 'technology' as the 'spear' of Shakespeare and 'network' a 'villain' as Prospero creating 'magic' and 'illusion' in our lives. 'Virtual' has become 'real' and real has taken a backseat in the heaven called 'home'. In this techno-savvy, digital, virtual world;it is imperative for the 'Humanities' to adapt the new normal. Toufann is one such child of this techno-renaissance playwright Dev Virahsawmy, a Mauritian playwright creating a 'tempest' by virtual slides on computer.Caliban is no more looked as black, beast, filthy or low born;he is a smart, handsome, creative, technical man with a heart already lost to Cupid's bow. Miranda is a feminist;reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex pregnant with Kalibann's child. Ariel is a Robot;now emotionless, mechanical and artificial. Ferdinand is infertile, fickle minded and wants the companionship of Robot Ariel. The present paper will discuss the techno aspect of the play in detail with the tinge of focus on the turns of events in the neo-millennials.
ABSTRACT
The onslaught of COVID-19 has veritably turned the world upside down and has necessitated a shift away from in-class teaching worldwide. As teachers around the world, in various socio-economic contexts, negotiate on a daily basis, the challenges of shifting gear to 'remote'- teaching, it is pertinent to ask what the implications of this change are for any commitment to postcolonialism. If the object of pedagogy is to transform the student from object to subject, in Paulo Freire's classic formulation, how does the process play out under the current conditions of teaching and learning, which, it seems, are here to stay? I proceed on the basis of my experience of teaching English literature in a suburban campus in India, where, as it is, teachers operate within minimal infrastructure and must deal with varying levels of linguistic competence within the student body. What additional challenges are posed by online teaching in such a scenario? How can postcolonial analyses help uncover the stakes of teaching and learning in a suburban Indian context? What larger implications does this have for the teaching of literature in particular, and pedagogy in general? In other words, what does a thoroughgoing postcolonial pedagogy under these circumstances look like?
ABSTRACT
Pedagogical stylistics refers to the application of the tools of stylistics in the teaching of the English language as a foreign or a second language. Teaching and learning poetry is challenging. Thus, pedagogical corpus stylistics (Henceforth, PCS) approach has been introduced to Iraqi undergraduate foreign language learners (EFL) to guide them to analyze poetic language. The study aims to make students interact with authentic examples of poetic language and answer questions about it. The main objective of the study is to examine whether PCS tools enable the learners to provide linguistic evidence from the poetic texts they are exposed to. This in turn ensures objective poetic analyses. Moreover, it aims to enable EFL Iraqi students to discover salient norms related to the Standard English language. The study reveals that the pedagogical corpus stylistic approach helps the students to discover language patterns using corpus tools with the help of the teacher's guidance at the beginning but this eventually leads to independent learning and discoveries about poetic language.
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This study discusses the potentials and challenges of Zoom theatre performances during the lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. It examines the utilization and applicability of videoconferencing software Zoom, and other streaming software compatible with it, in creating a viable performance option for theatre practitioners and audiences during mandatory social distancing. Such software can be a strategy for social inclusion, alleviating the adverse effects of extended quarantine. The article also discusses the technical and performative aspects of Zoom theatre, pointing out its pros and cons. It uses a critical and analytical approach to performances of two Zoom plays, Pandemic Therapy and Corona Chicken (Part Two), revealing how the playwright, dramaturg, and actors manage to present a live theatrical experience capable of engaging audiences and promoting social interaction. Khaled Mostafa Karam is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Suez University in Egypt and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University, USA. He has published eleven articles on the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science and drama. Galal Mohamed Naguib is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Suez University and author of several articles in the fields of demographic analysis and the sociology of art.
ABSTRACT
This essay discusses several books, ancient and recent, on plagues to ask the question: Can we face death without turning away from it through historical narration? Can we write about death, which only afflicts individuals, without stripping death of its individuality? After briefly addressing these questions, I discuss five books, one from the ancient period (Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War), one from the late medieval period (Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron), one from the early modern period (Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year), and two from the modern period (Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Frank Snowden’s Epidemics and Society). These books not only come from different eras but also reflect different written responses to death—ancient history, story/fable, reportage, futuristic novel, and contemporary history. The essay concludes by considering a counterargument to its focus on death, an argument developed by Baruch Spinoza which claims that humans should think nothing less than of death.
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In unprecedented times, people have turned to fiction both for comfort and for distraction, but also to try and understand and anticipate what might come next. Sales and rental figures for works of fiction about pandemics and other disease outbreaks surged in 2020, but what can pandemic science fiction tell us about disease? This article surveys the long history of science fiction's engagement with disease and demonstrates the ways in which these narratives, whether in literature or film, have always had more to say about other contemporary cultural concerns than the disease themselves. Nonetheless, the ideas demonstrated in these texts can be seen perpetuating through the science fiction genre, and in our current crisis, we have seen striking similarities between the behaviours of key individuals, and the manner in which certain events have played out. Not because science fiction predicts these things, but because it anticipates the social structures which produce them (while at the same time permeating the culture to the extent that they become the touchstones with which the media choose to analyse current events). This paper demonstrates that science fiction can be a valuable tool to communicate widely around a pandemic, while also acting as a creative space in which to anticipate how we may handle similar events in the future.