Seminar Descrpition

From Animal Farm to Lord of the Flies, the English foreign language classroom in Germany is still dominated by a focus on a rather restricted canon. Young adult literature is one viable alternative to traditional literary texts. In the 1990s a large number of young adult novels have been published in the U.S. that deal with multicultural issues reflecting the changes in American society. While most of these texts are by now easily available in Germany via internet bookshops, there is hardly any teaching material on the market that would help teachers use these texts in the classroom.

We believe that the university can play a role here in making material available to teachers that is otherwise hard to come by. At the same time the creation of teaching material can be an important issue in pre-service teacher training, thus facilitating the reflection of theories on teaching literature in the foreign language classroom by future teachers.

The material we present here is the product of such a course (Hauptseminar) on »Encounters with Literature on the Web – Multicultural Young Adult Literature of the 90s« at the University of Giessen, Germany, in the summer term of 1999. After a period of theoretical intake student teams of two chose a book and developed pre-, while-, and post-reading tasks. They then created a webpage presenting their novel and the tasks they developed.

We hope you enjoy the suggestions and maybe you will use one of the books in your classroom.

Andreas Müller-Hartmann & Annette Richter