A holistic approach

The following website has many resources on different kinds of literature, from the classics to multimodal texts. It has many interesting ideas on how to teach and assess literature.

http://www.teachingliterature.org

There are a host of activities that it, suggests, the following one caught my eye.

Devising Role-Play Activities

Select a scene in a text or an issue portrayed in that scene.  Based on a conflict or tension portrayed in the text or related to the issue, create a role-play with four roles, one for each member of a peer group, including yourself. Try to build the situation around a conflict or tension that will serve to perpetuate the role-play. This can involve:

- the characters themselves having to cope with a problem or make a decision related to an event in the text or some hypothetic event. 
- the characters coping with other new characters that you import from other texts, totally new characters, historical figures, celebrities, etc.

- a similar situation or predicament involving new “real world” roles that you create—for example, for Holes, a teacher makes her students stand next to a whiteboard with their noses on the whiteboard.
- a game, contest, or reality-TV drama (current or historical) in which students assume roles related to the themes or issues of the text.

Example: to examine the issue of gender and power in a text.  Mike and Sally, of Minneapolis, are visiting with Joe and Jane in their home, in Seattle.   Sally has just received an offer at a large firm in Seattle where Jane works.  Joe, a close friend of Mike’s, misses the cold weather in Minnesota and wants to move back to Minneapolis.  Mike has just received a promotion at his firm in Minneapolis.  Mike and Sally must decide on what to do: move to Seattle or stay in Minneapolis; Joe wants Mike to stay in Minneapolis and Jane wants Sally to move (these characters serve to push the conflict.)

Literature should be taught in an interactive way. This particular mode of role playing integrates a couple of things. It allows the role-playing to become relevant by including modern characters and even figures from popular media. Yet the primary text is used as well, but not any scene but one that would bring forth a particular theme for the play.
This can also be used as an idea for assessment as one can observe if the students are able to understand the essence of the drama through the acting, choice of words and the characters they include.
This particular mode can be relevant to a Singaporean context as well, one simply needs to add in a local flavour to spice things up.

There is an assessment component in this particular website as well and it suggests how literature can be assessed in various ways.