The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales examines and explores the attitudes and actions of individuals who were very much part of English society way back in those olden times. He delves into a satirical tone, highlighting the time in which he lived and focuses on the influences and characters associated with religion, deceitfulness and sexuality. Chaucer uses humour to lure his audience and in my opinion, to hide (to a certain extent) his true distaste of certain characters and their beliefs. He is able to bring to light the dishonesty and treachery people were faced with and pokes fun at the ridiculousness of individual’s materilstic ways.
Making Chaucer accessible to youngsters would have to be dependent on how interactive you could make it. The size of the book, the difficulties associated with the language and its structure would create barriers to learning and therefore could alienate potential learners. The activity in class where we acted out the parts through different genres was indeed fun and engaging. I particularly enjoyed listening to the audio as he spoke in gangster rap and would welcome similar resources to teaching Chaucer. The characters deserve to be explored as they depict mannerisms and influences which may be apparent in many of our communities today as well as giving insight to English history and culture.
The reading material, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner: The death of a Salesman’ and ‘Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’ are certainly useful and thorough. The Canterbury tales could easily be mistaken as a big chunk of boringness but with the extensive resources and readings, further exploration of Chaucer and his poetical works can be more appreciated and celebrated. I would suggest that students are encouraged to delve deeper into Chaucer and therefore accepting that each character with their unique tale can be noted as being part of an important part of English literature.