The Richness of IB Global Connections

It’s useful for us to remember that the Language A courses are taught in a whole panoply of languages with different critical approaches.

Very often, in workshops that include teachers of the Language A programs working in a variety of languages, good ideas emerge that can be used by everyone.  Here is one that might enliven or deepen your approach to close reading, from Nataliya Tsetkova:

A proposal for work with close reading from Nataliya Tsetkova, teacher of the Russian A Literature course

In order to ensure that students have well understood and remembered the details of the stories studied, I use the technique of ‘slow reading’ and ‘deep diving into the text’ for associative memory. I use this on the most significant fragments. Students in a kind of ‘gaming’ style develop a serious skill. They become aware of the semantic core of the text and remember it, sometimes by heart.

1st step
Something very productive for us turned out to be role-reading aloud (with the correct intonation!) of the key episodes, as well as staging of the narrative itself and even individual phrases. Expressive reading helps to assign meaning and intonation accents and under the influence of emotional experience, a stronger impulse to remember the desired fragments.

2nd step
The next step is to perform a specific task that updates knowledge and mobilizes creative memory. I call it «fragments with semantic spaces». Students reading a familiar text must insert the missing words, phrases, or sometimes a small, but meaningful phrase. The task is aimed, first and foremost, at the active emphasizing and storing of images, metaphors, epithets, hyperbole, litotes, comparisons, neologisms, artistic details, symbols, and the like.

It is important that this technique aims for a prolonged effect: knowing that they can be offered such a task at any time, the students initially read and learn texts extremely carefully, thoughtfully, with an internal motivation to remembering.

The strength of this task lies also in the fact that after repeated performance on material of different stories of the same author, students unwittingly begin to see and remember specific authorial artistic techniques, forms of literary conventions and the basic means of artistic expression.

3rd step
The third, final, phase of this assignment is homework. Make your own example of «fragments with semantic spaces», This allows students as much as possible to pay attention to close study of the works and to see the text from the ‘inside.’