Re-Creating Literature in the ESL Classroom

* One section of my bookshelves devoted to literature is crammed with writings by ESL students. Their tales of travel, new friends and foods, family adaptation, remembered heroes, and moments of loss and regret fill the pages of these newsletters, journals, classroom booklets, and even a few commercially published volumes. Elementary and high schools, adult programs, and literacy projects, as well as youth organizations and summer camps, produce these collections. All the writers are learners creating literature in their various types of classrooms in order to say, more often than not, what they cannot elsewhere. Emotion, confrontation, confession, and dreams fill page after page, pushing learners to use words never called for in mathematics, science, or social studies assignments; shaping lines of poetry and epigraphs from half sentences; and addressing readers who extend beyond teachers and school doors in authenticity. In ESL classrooms around the world, and especially in Canada and the U.S., the evolution of these forms of literature-poetry, short stories, dialogues, often accompanied by pictorial art and oral dramatic readings and music-generates essentials of language learning. Students write and rewrite, listen to their own and other's words again and again, read aloud to others, reshape their efforts to make words say just what they want them to mean. Literature has no rival in its power to create natural repetition, reflection on language and how it works, and attention to audience response on the part of learners. The wider the range of genres accepted as literature, the greater the potential for influence in classrooms beyond English and institutions beyond schools. Poetry and short stories allow dialogue, interior monologue, stories, and description, but arguments, editorials, biography, history, and sets of directions naturally call for explanation, comparative analysis, and narratives of events and places as well as of people. Across i , ., & Slater, S. (1987). Literature in the language classroom. Cambridge: idge University Press. , ., & Maley, A. (19 0). Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. , . (1993). Literature and language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University