The aim of BritLit is to help teachers from around the world exploit
English literature in the ELT classroom as a language tool. The Britlit project
started in Portugal under the auspices of British Council Portugal and the
Association of Teachers of English in Portugal (APPI).
Britlit
has already earned itself a reputation in classrooms and amongst teachers in a
number of countries, within and outside Europe. It has helped
teachers from around the world to exploit English literature in the ELT
classroom as a language tool. The project has developed a series of
resource 'kits' for teachers, each based on a particular short story written by
a contemporary author. They are called 'kits' because teachers are expected to
construct the lessons from the materials provided. In this way the project
tackled the problems of mixed ability English language classes. To provide even
greater flexibility the materials were produced exclusively in electronic
format - web and CD-Rom.
APAC
has participated in the project since 2004, by inviting Britlit Authors to our
yearly convention, and got more involved in 2008 with the publication of the
special monograph on Britlit, jointly edited with the British Council Barcelona.
APAC
and the British Council Barcelona have joined forces to make Britlit more present
in English classrooms in Catalonia. There is currently a team of teachers who have used the Britlit
materials and worked with the writings of Louise Cooper, a BritLit
author who visited Barcelona on occasion of the APAC 2009 Convention. The
team meets regularly and is open to all
APAC members.
We
believe that Britlit can represent much
more than it has been reported to do, especially in Spain. In the era
of CLIL, when there is a general promotion of the natural use of English in
the classroom, a project which promotes talking about authentic, unabridged and manageable literature is a very
attractive one. It is made even more attractive by the ‘meet the author’
activity when the writer comes to read their work and talk to us and our
students. For those of us teachers who
started to love the English Language through literature, this project helps us
to pass on our love of words to our students.
