Teaching Fiction: Challenges and Remedies for College Students and Instructors

I have been teaching fiction for a number of years and every time I walk into class to teach my students fiction, a short story or a novel, I get embarrassed to find out that my students who have taken courses such as “The Rise of the Novel, or “Introduction to Literature” still do not know to answer basic questions related to such courses. What is literature? What are the major genres of literature? What is fiction? What are the basic elements of fiction? These questions are fundamentals for literature students. Their inability of not answering them will cause big problems for college instructors presuming that students should have known these questions during the time they were students taking these courses above mentioned. These challenges rise when I first meet with my students taking fiction as university requirement. I ask them individually to answer these questions, to which they are unable to answer in good English. They just use words or phrases to answer, which adds a new challenge. There I have to stop and tell them. First, how to answer these questions using good English. Then I proceed with the answering the questions myself, so they are on the right track from the first day of meeting with them. Thus, this paper discusses the challenges of teaching fiction and provides ways, methods or remedies to handle them. It provides benefits of reading fiction for students and teachers. Finally, it demonstrates the delivery plan offered by the college in which I teach and the changes I have made on the original plan so that both can suit and achieve the desired learning outcomes.