호손의 『주홍글자』 읽기를 통한 분석적 사고, 비평적 독서, 학술적 논문 작성 능력 배양 지도 사례

Teaching Students How to Read, Write and Think Analytically and Critically Through a Close Reading of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

The purpose of this paper is to share a teaching experience of a course, the introduction to British and American fiction to 1900. It should first be stated, however, that what took place in the course does not exactly reflect what the course’s title suggests, for it was modified to meet students’ needs and desire to appropriate their close reading experience with Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as means not only to acquire the knowledge of British and American fiction to 1900 but also to improve their skills for reading, thinking and writing analytically and critically. Thus, rather than surveying the expanding canon of British and American novels belonging to the period, this course sought to help students to achieve such objectives through a variety of activities and assignments conducted outside and inside classroom. The activities and assignments include an in-class presentation, 10 weekly quiz, and 5 biweekly reviews on the assigned pages of The Scarlet Letter, and a 5-6 page term paper. Much of this paper is devoted to explain how those classroom and non-classroom activities of students were executed and interwoven with the instructor’s lectures about critical approaches to the novel in a way that they meet the aforesaid goals of the course. This paper is concluded with the instructor’s evaluation of his and the students’ performance based on the students’ semester-end comments upon the course.