Thank You, Holden Caulfield, and Goodbye: Fresh Ideas for Teaching Adolescent(s) Fiction—The What and the How

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The most effective remedy for the treatment of teenagers' declining willingness to engage with fiction in the classroom is a change of both books and methods. The paper argues for a replacment of time-honoured school classics by five recent US-American works which deal with issues target readers of today can identify with much more easily. It also outlines a number of student-centred activities which put greater emphasis on a creative and productive tackling of fiction than ritualised interpretation traditionally does. The novels are briefly characterised in a number of dominant features (plot, location, language) and are then used for demonstrating classroom activities which allow for individual, pair and group work.