Jane Austen's Society #cross-curricular #alqareading bookclub Language Skills in History

 Watching a documentary on Jane Austen's Society in "Language Skills in History" co-teaching lesson

JUSTO JAVIER PÉREZ

MARINA HURTADO

"Pride and Prejudice" presents a vivid portrayal of English country life during the Regency period, emphasising the social hierarchy, the importance of marriage, and the manners and etiquette prevalent in that era.

Jane Austen's society was the English society of the late 18th and early 19th centuries which is connected to the current curriculum of the 4th year of Compulsory Secondary Education. Austen herself lived from 1775 to 1817, and her novels provide insightful and satirical portrayals of the society in which she lived that is the main reason why we as teachers decided to use this documentary as a useful resource to work on the background of the novel and to develop the students' language skills.

With this activity, our students learnt how Jane Austen's society was characterised by a rigid class structure, where social status and wealth played a significant role in determining one's place in society so as they could understand the novel better while reading it. They used a graphic organiser to organise the contents of the documentary.

In Austen's society, women's roles were limited and that was another point that was highlighted while watching the documentary and was to be covered in another session. The students were aware thanks to the documentary that women had little control over their own finances or properties and were largely dependent on male relatives or husbands, something which is difficult to understand from a 21st century teenager's perspective.

We also made use of this presentation for the session.