Literature Circles in High Schools

The motivation of students in literature classes most of times is not as good as we teachers would like it to be, the habit of reading a book is not one of the preferences of our students nowadays.  Literature can be a good resource of vocabulary and a good opportunity to students to practice all the four abilities of language in interactions and conversations about the novel, history, tale or poem they are reading.  An interesting strategy to promote this interactions are the "Literature Circles", in this strategy the teacher selects  books to be suggested to the students, so they start to read it, but instead of just read and take notes or summarize it, the students are divided in groups of 6 or 7 students and each student has to performance a role in the production, the roles can be:

The Organizer- Is responsible to mediate the group in the discussion, the organizer must not let the discussion lose the focus or get a direction that is not related to the book, he also check if all the others students are really reading and reflecting about the history, registers the role that each student had performed.

The investigator - Is responsible for reading carefully the story and look for hints, clues and other details that can help the other students to understand better the story.

The summarizer- is responsible for summarize the story take in account all the information the group have discussed.

The researcher - Is responsible for contextualize the historical information, dates, social facts, political of the history making a bridge of the book with the reality at the time it was written or at the time the story is told.

The predictor -  Is the one who is going to create different possibilities for the next chapters of the history, according to what he has read.

The illustrator - Look for pictures, songs, draws, news etc. That can illustrate the story.

These are some examples of roles that the students can perform, after a week of reading they meet and discuss about the chapter they just read, then they change roles and pick a different responsibility. Literature circles are totally student centered, the teacher will just be a monitor to check if the strategy is being successful of if there is any students with problems to execute his role. At the end of the reading, all the groups will present their work to the class and the circle keep moving, this time the groups will change books and restart the process.
My students of high school simply love this activity, as they have autonomy to express their own perception about the history and are able to use creativity to add information to it.
I can alson mention that this activity can be set at the highest level of Bloom`s taxonomy, The students will create a real dossie about the book.