A Case Study of Using Test Items on Literature from the Secondary School English Teacher Employment Exam in English Literature Classes : Focusing on Anderson’s “Sophistication”
This paper demonstrates how I use teaching methods such as discussion based on thought-provoking questions, a “drawing a scene” teamwork, and writing an annotation for the group’s drawing in college literature classes. Among several literary works―e.g. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants” (1927)―for which I use these methods, this paper focuses on Sherwood Anderson’s “Sophistication,” one of the short stories in Winesburg, Ohio (1919). To find a connecting point between growing demands for both practical English (i.e. improving students’ reading and writing proficiency) and some ultimate goals of literature (i.e. reading and writing for pleasure and increasing human rights awareness and cultural sensitivity as well as the ability to empathize with minority groups and understand and tolerate others’ points of views), I attempt to choose text excerpts from the test items on literature in the Public Secondary School English Teacher Employment Exam. Based on my experience of teaching pre-service teachers majoring in English Education and preparing for the exam and helping them to organize and conduct study groups, I not only use excerpts from literary works in the test items (along with their full texts) as reading materials in literature classes for college students majoring in English Language and Literature, but I also devise to use teaching methods and activities that are effective to improve certain abilities, especially those concerning ultimate goals of literature rather than practical English, in which most pre-service teachers as well as students in literature classes are often deficient. For example, many students in my classes had a hard time understanding and empathize with the emotional disorder of the protagonist George in “Sophistication,” which is expressed with several examples of figurative language including a metaphor, “a leaf blown by the wind.”
