Teaching 'Twilight' in the EFL Classroom: Avoiding Possible Pitfalls and How to Use It in a Positive Manner

Abstract

Using literature in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom can be a great tool to promote love of reading or enlarge our students’ vocabulary but the students’ needs, interests, English level and age must be also taken into account. Using canonical works such as Shakespeare’s plays or Virginia Woolf’s works may be of little reading interest for our students. For that reason, in the following essay, we propose using Twilight to teach Secondary education students in Spain (Bachillerato and E.S.O.- Educación Secundaria Obligatoria). We will use Twilight, the first novel in the series by Stephenie Meyer, so as not to overwhelm our students with reading the four novels that make up the series. Given the scope of this paper, we will similarly focus on the novels, not on the movies, although many students may be already familiar with the movies. The use of Twilight in the classroom may be fraught with concerns that the series of novels have raised about the limited roles presented to female characters, the protagonist’s lack of independence, the similarities between the novels’ love interests and domestic abusers … For those reasons, we propose the use of Twilight to discuss issues such as the reliability (or unreliability) of first-person narrators, and, moreover, the reliability of one’s perceptions of the world. We hope to use the novels as a way to discuss concerns of our students in regards to their self-confidence or their perception of themselves, in a positive manner, fostering positive images for our teenage students, a stage of life characterized by difficulties, many changes and turbulent thoughts.

Keywords

• twilight
• eso
• efl
• domestic abuse
• self-confidence
• teenage students