Welcome, Educators!

Words Without Borders Campus brings eye-opening international literature to the high school and college classroom. Start browsing topics on the left, or watch the program in action in our four-minute video. 

Finding Readings

To find readings, you can browse through large country-based collections or find literature from dozens of other parts of the world on our blog. Know exactly what you’re looking for? Search the site for a particular country, language, author, or translator.  

Reading Literature on WWBC

After you click on a piece of literature from the homepage, country landing page, or Find page, it will appear on a new screen.

The story, poem, or essay will be on the left side of the screen. On the right side or beneath the literature, you can use the tabs to see bios, definitions, context (for instance, a video interview with the author, or a photo gallery of the place a poem is describing), teaching ideas, and ways to further explore the culture, author, or themes. There are also links to related reading at the bottom of the page.

Resources for teaching and learning:

• About: Definitions of culturally specific words and publication notes
• Bios: Information about authors and translators
• Original: Text in original language (if available)
• Context: Resources to help students understand the literature, including author/translator interviews, images, maps, and music
• Playlist: Links to opportunities for further exploration of the culture, author, themes or genre
• Teaching Ideas: 2-5 ideas for teaching each work of literature (see below.)

Beneath each work of literature, the "Related Reading" list describes comparable literature from the website.

What to Teach?

You may be interested in finding a single poem or story—or in teaching a whole series of pieces from a particular country. This site is flexible, and provides tools for teaching pieces of literature individually or in groups. You can:
 

• Dip in for a piece or two—a poem such as "Sleepless Homeland," from Mexico, or a story such as "The Guest," from Egypt
• Choose one theme from a particular country—for example, Fathers in Chinese literature
• Teach all the contemporary literature from a particular country—our first five units are Mexico, China, Egypt, Japan, and Russia
• Make your own theme-based unit by looking at the same theme across different cultures; for example, the theme of Leaving Home appears in all the country collections on the site.

Launching a Lesson

Many of the Teaching Ideas include ways of engaging students at the beginning of a lesson. Some general ideas are below:

1. Find a compelling idea, term or fact in the introductory essay for the unit, and put it on the board. (For instance, from Chip Rossetti's essay on Egypt: "Nahda": a renaissance.) Invite students to talk about the idea, term, or fact in relation to their own lives. (E.g., for "Nadha," "Have you ever begun to question an old way of thinking?")

2. Play students a piece of music or a video from the Context section, or show them a compelling image. Alternatively, before the lesson begins, you might assign different pieces of context to different students (or small groups), and ask them to prepare to present their pieces of context to the class.

3. Have a student who knows the original language of the piece to expressively read a few lines in that language. Ask the other students to use clues from the reading (emotional intonations, rhythms, etc.) to make some preliminary guesses about the nature of the piece.

​Using the Teaching Ideas

You can access Teaching Ideas by clicking on the "Teaching Idea" tab on the right-hand side of the page for a piece of literature. Each idea can be used to construct a lesson plan, and often, you'll find a few different kinds of assignments (analytical as well as creative) within the same idea.  

To see how an educator used WWB Campus Teaching Ideas to create a compelling lesson, watch a video featuring New York City educator Stephanie Chiu. (Discussion of Teaching Ideas around 9:40.)

Some of the Teaching Ideas include links to additional materials, such as artwork or audio files. Students can access those materials via links in the Context or Playlist tabs. The Teaching Ideas are also linked to the U.S. Common Core Anchor Standards for ELA. 

Using Original Languages

You can find original-language works by searching with the keyword "bilingual" and/ or a particular language on Search the Site.  

Some pieces are available in their original languages on WWB Campus—for example, Carmen Boullosa's poem "Sleepless Homeland" is available in Spanish via the "Original" tab.  

Other works have links to the original language versions towards the top of the "Context"; below, you'll see an example of a such a link for the Chinese poet Du Mu's "Poems for Parting." 

You might:

1. Have students who know the original language read it aloud. The students who listen might then discuss how the poem "sounds" to them, and the emotions the sounds evoke.
2. For Romance languages such as Spanish, Italian, and French, have students use their knowledge of word roots and sentence structure to make comparisons between the translation and the original. (For instance, are the sentences more complex in the original or the translation?)

Sample Lesson Plans

Sample lesson plans are posted for each country's literature on its landing page, which you can access from the top of the Find page. 

Sample lesson plans appear towards the bottom of the country's landing page, below the introduction to the country's literature. 

Links to a few sample lesson plans are below:   

• Egypt: "The Guest," a short story; lesson plan for Teaching Idea 2 includes suggestions for supporting English Language Learners (ELLs)
• Japan: "The Trapped Boy," a short story; lesson plan includes links to revised New York as well as CC standards
• Mexico: "Sleepless Homeland," a poem; lesson plan includes suggestions for supporting ELLs

Partnering with Other Classrooms

Are you and your students interested in connecting to classrooms in other parts of the world—perhaps reading manga with peers in Japan, sharing stories of migration with peers in Mexico, or discussing human rights with peers in Russia? This blog post includes a detailed list of virtual exchanges.

Reading Levels

On the Find page, you can filter texts by their reading grade levels: the levels students need to be at in order to access the texts. For example, a tenth grader may be reading at an eighth grade level. Since all the literature featured on this site has multiple levels of meaning, we recommend searching for all the reading levels your students are able to access (e.g., for students at a fifth-grade level, search for grades 1-5.)

For teachers using lexiles, the chart below outlines approximate conversions.

Reading grade-levels don't always correspond to maturity levels: the Japanese comic "Tetsu of the Yamanote Line" is at a second and third grade reading level, but includes scenes of violence and is much better-suited to young adults than to elementary students. (In fact, this story is an excellent "hi-lo" text, likely to engage older students who are reading below grade-level.)

Other texts on this site are both written in simple language and appropriate for children, such as the inspiring Mexican poem "Nothing Remains Empty," by Juan Gregorio Regino. We recommend fully reading any text before using it in the classroom.

For U.S. Teachers: CCS

For middle and high school teachers in the U.S., we've listed which Common Core Reading and Writing Anchor Standards the different Teaching Ideas address.

Reading

Standards 1-10 are the nationwide Common Core Standards. In New York State, teachers have an additional Standard: #11:

Respond to literature by employing knowledge of literary language, textual features, and forms to read and comprehend, reflect upon, and interpret literary texts from a variety of genres and a wide spectrum of American and world cultures.

All the teaching ideas on this site support national Common Core Standard 10 (Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently) as well as NYS Standard 11. Most Teaching Ideas also address three or more of the other reading standards.

Writing

We've provided a variety of ideas for writing assignments, including analytical essays and creative responses. Most frequently, you will see that the assignments are supporting CCS Writing Standards 1, 3 and 4. However, if students develop the writing they begin in the suggested activity, then the assignments would support Standard 5 and possibly 6. And, of course, if students are routinely writing in response to site or in-class assignments, then the course is supporting Standard 10.

For more detailed information, take a look at a sample CCS-aligned lesson that incorporates WWB Campus material, and read about how to address the CCS with international literature.

Assigning Reading

The pieces of literature are of varying lengths, taking about ten minutes to forty minutes to read. We designed the website to be usable by teachers and students with different levels of Internet access and classroom practice. You can:

1. Assign a piece of literature for students to read online, at home, or in your classroom,
2. Print out a piece of literature and pass out copies to students, or
3. Project the piece onto a SMART Board, or make transparencies.

Giving Us Feedback

We want to hear from you! To tell us what you think of the site, suggest a resource, report an issue, ask a question, or provide another kind of feedback, write to us on the Contact page.