EAL Literature

EAL Literature

Washbourne, Alice. EAL Pocketbook. Teacher's Pocketbooks, 2011.

Pim, Chris. How to support children learning English as an additional language. LDA, 2010.

In search of Murakami's imaginary world

Make yourself comfortable, ideally with cup of bitter coffee to stimulate your senses, and watch this short documentary video about an exceptional Japanese writer - Haruki Murakami. You will set in search of places where Murakami set some of his stories and where he himself gained inspiration for his often magic and "out of this world" novels.

In the course of the documentary Murakami's foremost translators and biographers such as Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum comment on author's writing style and major themes the Japanese writer explores in his works. One of the narrators of the documentary suitably describes the major topics and themes that we can often see in his stories:

"In the Wild Sheep Chase Murakami discovered the story he wanted to tell. The story of a loner, solitary character whose physical and emotional journey is transformed as the book progresses into a voyage into unexplored areas of his mind and imagination. Undoubtedly, it is this surreal, detached introspection what has become Murakami's trademark and which has inspired his intense relationship with his devout found base."

Whether you are or not (yet) one of his fans this video is definitely worth watching.

Suffering of I. Denisovich

Couple of weeks ago I decided to crack on Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. Needless to say that to set into this kind of novel is always matter of momentary mood. That mood actually came one day after a short thought on how comfortable life we actually live without appreciating it properly. "What lives do we live? Aren't we happy enough? Do we really need more?" were questions coming up to my mind straight away after reading breathlessly the back side summary of the "One Day". Driven by the desire to find some answers to my questions I got the book the same day and set on a sorrowful journey full of hopelessness and suffering.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is a hard-to-believe story about one typical day in a Stalinist labour camp from a prisoner's point of view. It gives us an invaluable account on the harsh and miserable life of mostly innocent victims of an ill ideology and shows us how fragile the freedom of an individual in a totalitarian regime can be.