The poem "Eating Together" in the EFL Classroom. A Lesson Plan for Intermediate Learners (PDF)

Lesson Plan from the year 2014 in the subject Didactics - English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,0, Free University of Berlin (Zentrum für Lehrerbildung), course: Ü 54964 "Media, Literature and Language Learning," Peter Stear, language: English, abstract: This paper contains suggestions on how to teach communicative and interpretation competences by using the poem "Eating Together" by Li-Young Lee.
The poem deals with, amongst other aspects, the death of a beloved family member and mirrors the atmosphere of a family dinner after the tragedy. On the surface, the text cuts out any emotion towards the dependant's death and concentrates solely on the basic actions of the family and on inanimate objects (cf. l. 1-9). Towards the ending, the text alludes to the family's loss: "he lay down to sleep like a snow-covered road" (l. 9-10). This topic is of high relevance for students in tenth grade and touches upon their everyday life experiences. Additionally, vocabulary as well as grammatical structures in the poem is appropriate for the language level of B1. For these reasons, this essay aims at illustrating the importance of Eating Together for the EFL classroom by developing a model lesson including pre-, while-, and post-reading activities