Learn English with 20th Century Literature

Learn grammar and vocabulary using English stories: a course for EFL students

This course is aimed at students learning English as a foreign language (upper-intermediate or advanced level) who love literature and who would like to improve their English skills using stories. The course focuses on the first few chapters of 9 different works of literature. In each book, we come across different vocabulary and different grammar, although you will see some words and topics repeated, because repetition is the mother of all learning. Every lecture in split up into smaller 10-minute(ish) parts, and a quiz follows each one to check you have understood the topic. The following books are analysed in this course:

1) The Guardians (John Christopher). This is a dystopian fiction for young adults. I would describe it as similar to 1984 or Brave New World, but with a more exciting plot. In this book we examine correlative conjunctions, lists, and parallel structure. We examine the vocabulary in every book in this list, but this one contains the easiest language as it was aimed at an adolescent audience, and that's why I have put it at the beginning.
2) The Postman Always Rings Twice (James Cain). This is a crime novel that was banned in Boston due to the sex and violence that make it a part of the 'noir' genre. The story contains a large number of phrasal verbs, which are so important for English fluency, so we focus on these in the lessons.
3) Hills Like White Elephants (Ernest Hemingway). This is a very short story, not more than 5 pages, which contains a large amount of ellipsis (omission of words) and substitution (pronouns). These are our grammar topics, and Hemingway uses them to great effect in this tale.
4) Strangers on a Train (Patricia Highsmith). This is another crime novel with some very interesting characters. We focus on narrative tenses (past tenses) and perfect modal forms (modal + have + 3rd form).
5) The Daughter of Time (Josephine Tey). This is a historical novel in which a modern detective, while bored and recovering from an injury in hospital, investigates who killed the princes in the tower during the reign of Richard the Third. He arrives at some astonishing, yet convincing, conclusions. We analyse the perfect forms of gerunds and to plus infinitive.
6) The Iron Heel (Jack London). This is a political novel with an interesting plot. The main protagonist is an ardent socialist with a talent for arguing for his cause. There is a large amount of subject-auxiliary verb inversion, so this is our focus.
7) Waterland (Graham Swift). Written in the 80s, this is an emotional tale about a history teacher who decides to tell the pupils about his own personal history, which they seem to enjoy more than the stories about major historical events. We analyse the various functions of would and as in this story.
8) A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters (Julian Barnes). This is more like 10 short stories rather than 1 novel, but the stories do overlap. Once again, there is a large number of interesting phrasal verbs, so we focus on these.
9) Mr Know All (Somerset Maugham). This is another gripping short story that does not take long to read. We analyse the gerunds and infinitives in order to revise their usage.

The three most modern stories (The Guardians, Waterland, A History of the World) are not freely available online, so you will need to buy these texts, but all other books are available on free websites such as Project Gutenberg