Literary Education for Teachers: Fostering Reading
Literary Education for Future Teachers
The literary training of future teachers is essential. In primary schools, children begin reading through children’s literature and are introduced to fragments of great literary works. A teacher’s literary foundation must always exceed the training provided to their students. Student teachers should know and have read the classics of Spanish literature, understand the keys to interpreting literary language, grasp literary creation mechanisms, and, above all, be passionate readers to transmit their enthusiasm to students.
Cultivating a reading habit can be challenging, especially for student teachers who already have established routines and limited time for reading. A comprehensive literary education involves learning the keys to literary language, interpreting and enjoying literary texts, understanding the history of Spanish literature, and appreciating great works of children’s and youth literature. All these elements aim to instill a love for reading in pupils.
Educational Models for Literature Instruction
There are four primary educational models for teaching literature:
- Rhetoric: Aims to master the art of speech, figures, and rules for public speaking and writing.
- Historicist: Views literature as a reflection of a people’s ideology, valuing the knowledge of romance through poetry to foster national consciousness.
- Textual: Based on the practice of text analysis, this model develops literary competence and reading comprehension.
- Based on Knowledge of Texts: Focuses on the reading process, developing students’ reading skills, and encouraging them to read. It seeks texts closer to students’ interests to create reading habits, conceiving the book as an object of consumption.
Literature plays an interdisciplinary role, asserting that the task of encouraging reading and working with literary texts falls within the competence of all teachers.
Reading Promotion Strategies
- Readings of works adapted and appropriate to students’ interests.
- Selection of texts from youth or children’s literature.
- Poetry reading.
- Classroom library.
Classifying Oral Literature
- Stories.
- Legends.
- Poetry.
- Compositions in prose or verse.
- Cries.
Oral Literary Education Opportunities
- Storytelling.
- Telling stories through pictures.
- Traditional poetry, with or without music, which young children love.
- Riddles.
- Jokes.
The Comic as a Literary Genre: Before learning to read, children are curiously attracted to images and flipping through comics. This genre is highly motivating and features clear narrative sequences that facilitate understanding. Comics offer many educational possibilities: creating a comic, changing a story, summarizing a story, or studying language nuances.
Teachers must know the main characteristics, schools, authors, and the history of Spanish literature. Only with a strong historical background can teachers truly understand and enjoy Spanish literary works. While elementary school students may not be ready to read the classics, they must begin to learn about the history of literature, just as they learn about biology, mathematics, and other subjects.
Literary Commentary in Education
Introducing text commentary in literature teaching aims to combat situations where children learned endless lists of authors and movements without direct contact with literary works. It imposes a methodology to help students dissect, study, and discuss a text effectively.
The purpose of literary commentary is primarily didactic. True communication occurs only when we understand a message. Similarly, we truly comprehend a text only when we understand its content and the writer’s specific focus and form in developing a theme. This deep understanding reveals the text’s full meaning and intent.