On the Importance of Teaching West African Literature. A Teaching Proposal for Adichie's "Americanah"

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Didactics - English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 14, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Institut für Anglistik), course: Studying and Teaching West African Literature and Culture, language: English, abstract: Before this paper will aim to give relevant reasons for teaching West African Literature, it will examine the question of why we even teach literature at all in the language classroom.

As the restricted frame of this paper will not allow to cover West African Literature in general, especially in means of all the various countries that are included in this term, it will only focus on the novel "Americanah" which is a literary work by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. First, it will shed a light on teaching Literature in general an explain why there is a much-needed step towards New Literatures such as the described novel is. Then, it will provide a short summary of the plot and themes in Americanah, followed by probably the most important part which will introduce a teaching proposal for the novel.

As it is with every material a teacher chooses for a class, he or she has to ask himself what the students can learn from it, how it is of bigger advantage and whether it is more beneficial than rather choosing another material or method. In this case, it is the quite convincing power of literature to be an authentic source that significantly helps improving the process of language learning.