The Origins of Classic Tales: A Didactic Unit for Secondary School in the English Language Classroom

Abstract

The aim of this project is to show that literature can become a relevant element to introduce in the English as a foreign language class. Bearing in mind that this issue is still disregarded in numerous school contexts, this project will demonstrate that by making the appropriate choices it is possible to be successful when introducing literature aspects in the English classroom. In order to conduct this project, I have followed the first modality concerning an improvement in education during the internship period. For this reason, a didactic unit has been created concerning the introduction of original texts from widely known tales. Those extracts showed surprising facts which some tales hold when going back to their original sources. In this regard, they were introduced to show how different they could be when comparing them to its media adaptations. Furthermore, those texts were also used to work on linguistic, cultural and personal-growth aspects along with a combination of activities regarding the use of new technologies in education. This unit has been implemented seven times in a secondary school with students from 1st of ESO and Bachillerato and it suffered several changes after each implementation in order to improve those aspects that did not work appropriately in the classroom. At the end of the unit, students were also able to evaluate the implementation and their results will serve to establish a new proposal of improvement.