Kelly+Herbeck's+Book+Rationale



Speak by Laurie Anderson

High school is a difficult time. It is filled with identity issues, popularity competitions, and even deep seeded issues adolescents have trouble vocalizing. A typical teenager feels that no one can understand them and no one else is going through the same thing: they feel isolated and constantly different. By presenting a novel, such as //Speak//, students will become engaged in a story about a young teenager going through many of the same anxieties most high school students experience. Speak is a novel easily relatable for adolescents. This story is narrated by an adolescent and written in the language that young adults can understand and relate to. The reader gets the feeling of being in the character’s shoes simply by the language used.

The narrator provides a point of view and inner-dialogue that can be appreciated by adolescents //and// adults. Sometimes adults can forget what it is like to think and feel as a teenager and it creates a perspective to foster understanding and empathy. While there are some dark issues being handled, it represents a true, honest depiction of how a teenager may try and handle such situations. It is not glossed over to represent the idealized way of handling a difficult situation, rather it is presented with a more realistic teenage response.

//Speak// also offers many opportunities to explore writing style whether it be metaphors, streams of consciousness, unusual language/terms, in addition to many other literary contexts. What is most beneficial to the text is the positive outcome of working through the emotions and learning to “speak” up for oneself. By presenting that ultimate goal meshed in with a real story, adolescents can parallel it more to their own lives. By creating a character in which shoes they can walk in, it helps teach the students how to problem solve within the safe constraints of this story. This technique can then be transferred into issues they may be dealing with in their own lives.

Teaching this novel not only presents new literary content to be analyzed, it also presents students with a text that is relatively easy to read and comprehend to spark their interest in reading material that can be relatable to them.