The border between fact and fiction becomes blurred in legend, stories which themselves have a history, and in their evolving shape they carry the imprint of all the hands that passed them. Through the Internet, students can track the growth of a legend like that of King Arthur, from its emergence in the so-called Dark Ages to its arrival on the…

This lesson plan highlights one episode in the "Divine Comedy" to provide students with an introduction to Dante's poem. After a brief introduction to the opening of the "Divine Comedy," which portrays Dante as a pilgrim guided by the poet Virgil on a journey through the Christian afterlife toward God, students read Canto 5 of…

This lesson introduces students to one of the most admired characterizations in Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," the Wife of Bath. Students read Chaucer's description of the Wife in the "General Prologue" to consider how he represents her, both as the poet of "The Canterbury Tales" and as a character in his own poem,…

Discouraged and dissatisfied with their students' responses to a compilation of Arthurian legends, two ninth-grade teachers developed an approach to teaching the legends that exposes students to numerous versions (including those written and illustrated for children) of the legends and allows them to pick their own Arthurian legend for reading and…

A context-based framework for teaching the history of Portuguese is presented. It incorporates passages from a medieval Galician-Portuguese work to illustrate diachronic linguistic processes in the evolution of the language. Advantages of the approach, prerequisites, text, and syllabus are described, and a sample analysis is provided. (53…

This unit was created as a result of a summer institute sponsored by the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. The Center's goal is to improve student learning of foreign languages in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12). To this end, the Center provides professional support for foreign language…