Innovation in Language Learning

It is widely accepted that content-based instruction helps to contextualise language, but educators might be daunted by the idea of using non-graded L1 novels for content-based instruction. While there are several reasons why a short novel may not be the ideal choice for all situations, I have used scaffolding for several short novels, including William Golding's Lord of the Flies and John Steinbeck's The Pearl and Lois Lowry's The Giver, with success. I have had the greatest success scaffolding and teaching The Giver to second year Japanese EFL students. I will present practical ideas for using this novel to teach all four language skills as well as suggestions for how to use the novel for vocabulary building and creative writing.  I hope that, by sharing my ideas and examples, participants can take away useful ideas for how they might create materials and use L1 novels in their own ESL/EFL courses. I hope to help prove that, with a little innovation and some easy-to-create materials, using the L1 novel in the L2 classroom doesn’t have to be a daunting task, and can be just as advantageous to students’ language learning as using graded readers or texts, if not more so.

Keywords: Using L1 Novels for L2 Students, Literature, CLIL;