Literature: Internal Forms.

This curriculum guide in literature, developed as part of a total English curriculum for pre-kindergarten through grade 10, suggests that students can best understand literature by recognizing its internal forms (i.e., characteristics that recur in settings, characters, and narrative patterns). Materials cover (1) an overview for teachers on the significance of the recurrent narrative patterns of romance, irony, tragedy, comedy, and their variations, (2) a design for teaching these recurrent narrative patterns, grade by grade, (3) 33 items of selected knowledge to be taught during the course of study, from the plot pattern of the simplest folktale to the more complex narrative patterns, character types, and settings in literary works, and (4) proposed sequential learning experiences, which at the elementary level include such activities as the telling, dramatizing, and writing of real and imagined experiences; at the junior high level, the understanding of the tragic setting in "The Song of Roland"; and at the senior high level, the discussion and dramatization of the central events in "By the Waters of Babylon." (See also TE 001 639.) (JB)