ESSAY

Not only does society believe that we should encourage literature in schools, but that we
should take action immediately to achieve that goal. In this essay I am going to analyse the
options with which literature would be stimulated.

Recently, in many schools around the world, demands have been made for standard exams
to be given less weight in marks, because they do not test what you have actually learnt.
Therefore, I believe that literature exams could be replaced by a method in which students
would write short dissertations about the books and then interpret them and evaluate the
students according to the quality of their argumentation and research work.

On the other hand, whilst these ways of expanding the taste for literature have hardly ever
been discussed, I see the merit of combining students' enjoyment of technology with
reading books or even listening to them. In fact, we have always had film adaptations
which, if the students see them and like them, they will probably start reading the book, and
they will also be able to discover which genres they are most attracted to by doing so. In
the same way, there are also audiobooks or podcasts, theatre plays... which can help
students to discover the exciting stories told in books that people who do not read do not
know about.

With the above in mind, which can be posited to be the most convenient option? Although
testing by letting pupils' imaginations run wild in interpreting different texts can make
students more motivated to develop their literary spirit, there will still be people who copy
work from the internet and do not read a single word. Thus getting students to find stories
they are passionate about through film, audiobook or drama will encourage them to read
the stories in detail in books, acquiring the habit of reading and not having to invent new
ways of evaluating them.

To conclude, in light of the argument above, although improving the education and testing
system can be beneficial for students and motivating when working on the subject, as in
this case it would be literature; I believe that the best start to incentivise this is to bring
young people to literature through more approachable ways for them, such as films, plays
or podcasts.