I’m teaching a couple of American Literature courses this semester, and they’re quite a challenge. It’s not easy teaching Whitman, Twain, Steinbeck and Hemingway to Chinese students who can’t understand half the words they’re reading.
Though they are juniors who have been studying English since grade school, most of them have never read an entire book in English. Plus, they’ve learned most of their vocabulary from textbooks filled with jargon, clichés and bad academic writing.
It’s hard enough for them to read an English newspaper or magazine. Trying to get them to interpret great American writers who use the language in unique ways is a monumental task. “It gives me headaches,’’ one of my students complained.
Instead of assigning entire books, I’ve been asking students to read short stories and chapters from novels. After they read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’’ by Washington Irving, I gave them a short quiz to see how much of it they understood.
One multiple-choice question asked them to select the name of the scary figure that Ichabod Crane encounters in the woods. The choices were the Headless Horseman, The Man With Two Brains and Wonder Dog.
More than half the class chose The Man With Two Brains and several picked Wonder Dog. I’m now thinking of adding comic books to the reading list.
