English Literature Course Integrated with Learner-centered Classroom Activities in a Graduate School of Education

Abstract

This study introduces an English literature course integrated with learner-centered classroom activities in a graduate school of education and to evaluate it by students’ feedbacks and my course reflections. English literature courses in Korea for undergraduates or graduate students are usually designed by lecture or seminar (discussion) style teaching. Students, however, often have difficulty showing their personal responses to the English literature text through discussion due to various reasons such as EFL context or lack of discussion experience, which leads to students’ lack of confidence creating a bit depressed atmosphere in the classroom. That’s why I attempted to use learner-centered classroom activities in the English literature course. As is widely known, classroom activities have many advantages; channeling reader’s personal responses to various expressional forms, engaging readers to learn the process of analysing text and inducing their responses, and encouraging them to value their learner-centered learning experience by accomplishing tasks by themselves. My students were pre-service English teachers in a graduate school of education in Gyeonggi province, so the course objectives were both to read texts for fun as a learner and to find educational implications through classroom activities as a teacher. Although I tried to keep the balance among lecture, discussion, and classroom activities, this paper mainly describes the process and reflections involved in classroom activities.