The adventages of creative pre-, while- and postreading activities in English lessons

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: sehr gut, University of Hamburg (Fachbereich Erziehungswissenschaften), course: Proseminar Einführung in die Englisch-Didaktik, language: English, abstract: Creative approaches to textual work play an important role in EFL1 lessons as they offer a great potential with regard to developing language skills and intercultural learning and as they are very popular among pupils. In terms of the negative results of PISA, the approach to reading comprehension has immensely changed. Didactics have found out that tackling (literary) texts in the traditional way hardly motivates learnes to achieve good results. Therefore, it is more useful to centre topics and literary texts which have significance for the learners, treat them in a different way and employing new methods, such as reading different texts in the English lessons (for example 'Harry Potter') and applying creative writing. Reading, writing, learning English should make sense to the pupils. 'ESL2/EFL learners need a reason to read.'3 Fortunately, these changes are even visible in the current curricula guidelines. In my term paper, I will lay the focus on pre-, while- and post-reading-activities with regard to literature. Firstly, I will present the aims and advantages of while- and postreading- activities, then I will carry out a practical approach by suggesting a short story ('Peter's Beach') and presenting some post-reading-activities and discussing them. [...]