Personal Themes in Literature: The Multicultural Experience

By Valerie Whiteson and Sally Jorgensen

This collection of international short stories, novel excerpts, and poetry exposes students to various writing styles from around the world. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 013013418X
• ISBN13: 9780130134189
• Release Date: April 1993
• Publisher: Pearson Education ESL
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A wonderful multi-cultural selection

I find this book tremendously helpful! There are five thematic chapters, on identity, memories, relationships, changes and work. It has a great selection of high quality stories and poems by authors like Hemingway, Marge Piercy, Amy Tan, and Sandra Cisneros. As a big bonus for the teacher, there are vocabulary and comprehension exercises, along with excellent discussion questions. I strongly disagree with the view that the selections violate all the rules of written English. There's a huge difference between academic writing, with its theses, topic sentences, etc. and literature.As is evident from the title, this is literature. There are plenty of books on academic writing available--but this isn't one of them, and it doesn't pretend to be. What makes this book special is the high quality of the selections and the breadth of exercises, making a teacher's life much easier. Highly recommended!

Variety is the Spice of Life. . . .

Loaded with cross-cultural readings and styles of writing, I enjoy reading this book. My students do too. The only thing is, it's not a good choice when it comes to using the reading as a springboard to writing. A good paradigm for good writing this book is not. Not that the stories or their content is bad, but most of the stories take extensive poetic license and seemingly violate every principle of writing. I am trying to get my students to write good paragraphs from topic sentences to supporting details. In other words, before learners of writing can take license to violate the rules of proper English, they've got to know how to write proper English. This book is loaded with stories that violate so many principles of good English from capitalization, punctuation, spelling, syntax and on and on. Like an adolescent bent on hanging out with more street-wise 20 year-olds, I try to steer my students away from "unsavory" elements, at least for the moment. As a reading book for individuals who are already fairly strong in using good English, this provides wonderful literature and fodder for further exploration, including writing. As a model for novice writers, however, even advanced ESL students, it misses the mark.