Types of Literature That English Teachers Teach

Poetry

Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats are all poets one will typically find in high school literature textbooks. Textbooks for younger children often include poems by Langston Hughes, Shel Silverstein and Ogden Nash. Teachers expose students to many types of poetry--from short haiku to lengthy Old and Middle English ballads. Children learn about rhyme, meter, symbolism and many other poetic devices by studying the poetry and using the poems they study as a stepping-off point to create their own poems. One of the most well-known poems students study in high school is the epic poem The Iliad, accompanied by its counterpart The Odyssey.

Non-fiction

Nonfiction is a major part of any English departments curriculum. Students read examples of many different kinds of nonfiction. Autobiographies and biographies are introduced in the early grades, with textbooks featuring biographies of many of the authors that are studied. Autobiographical statements also accompany many of the selections. English teachers also use nonfiction to tie their curriculum into other core subjects, such as science, social studies and math. Students read selections that detail how to perform a task as well as stories of real-life adventures and historical events.

Drama

English teachers begin to teach drama as early as kindergarten by helping students learn to participate in short finger plays and choral readings. Plays get progressively longer and more complex as students advance through the primary grades. By high school, students are reading plays, such as Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet, Thornton Wilders Our Town and George Bernard Shaws Pygmalion. Teachers emphasize sequence and plot in the primary grades and teach dramatic themes and character development later on, including the historical background embedded in the plays.

Short Story

It is doubtful that any high school students graduate without having read short works by Ray Bradbury, Amy Tan and Edgar Allen Poe. Teachers commonly select the short stories they teach from literature anthologies in the form of textbooks. These anthologies include short stories in numerous genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror and realism. Teachers who teach earlier grades can choose from a variety of folk tales and excerpts from longer fiction selections, such as Laura Ingalls Wilders Little House on the

Prairie, in addition to modern selections that may or may not have been written expressly for the literature textbook.

Long Fiction

Long fiction does not begin to appear in English literature textbooks until middle school. Teachers may find teaching long fiction difficult, due to student absences, schedule changes, standardized testing and other interruptions that may disrupt students study of the piece. Author Maya Angelou's story I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, appears in many high school anthologies, as does Henry David Thoreau's Walden.Teachers also teach Pearl S. Bucks, The Good Earth, William Goldings Lord of the Flies and John Steinbecks Of Mice and Men in many schools. The novels a teacher chooses to will depend on the grade she is teaching as well as whether or not the class is an advanced placement course.