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Teaching Introduction to American Literature to Graduate Students

I have taught Introduction to American Literature to English Education students of the Graduate School at Dongguk University. I prepared a course package selected from different literary sources in order to meet students’ demands, both intellectual and pragmatic, because when taking this class, they want to achieve two objectives at the same time: studying general history of American literature and getting better prepared for passing the teacher’s examination. We covered not only a whole literary period from “The Declaration of Independence” to contemporary works but also basic American political ideologies like freedom, equality, and democracy. The class was delivered more on the basis of presentation and discussion rather than a lecture by myself. Besides active class participation, students were required to write a short response paper in English every week. Even though the writing assignment was a great burden to some students who haven’t ever practiced writing in English, it greatly contributed to improving students’ academic writing capacity. Some suggestions were made by students at the end of class. One of them was to include more American poems in a course package with withdrawing short stories and dramas because they believed they could understand poems only with the help of a professor. Another was asking more frequent feedbacks about response papers by the professor. After reviewing the whole sixteen weeks, I have been strongly determined to offer better classes next semester.