Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie
This unit on Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie is designed to focus on holistic, analysis and evaluation of the work. The activities focus on developing…
- an independent, personal response to the work.
- an interpretation of the ideas and issues raised throughout the work.
- an appreciation for and evaluation of broader literary choices made in the work.
- an understanding of metafiction and intertextuality.
- an appreciation for the role questions play when engaging with a work.
The resources in this unit include:
- An activity portfolio, divided into parts.
- Presentation slides to accompany the activity portfolio.
- A rubric to assess an infographic activity.
- A rubric to evaluate the activity portfolio.
- An essay assessment.
Teaching Resources (PDF)
Teaching Resources (Word)
A Note about the Resources
Activity Portfolio
The activity portfolio has been divided into parts that correspond with the parts of the novel. Because of the length of the novel (590 pages), we decided to structure the reading and teaching of the novel into its parts.
There are a few places in the activity portfolio that engage students in discussion about the novel. The discussion questions are taken from this resource. To my understanding, these questions were developed as part of the “One Book, One New York” project.
The passages in the “Metafiction Passages” document include the first and last lines of the passages in addition to the page numbers and chapters from which they were extracted. For copyright reasons, the bulk of the passage has been removed. Teachers can easily copy/paste the passages from the Kindle version of the work; chapter and page numbers are provided. This activity also gives teachers the opportunity to discuss the work’s intertextual features.
Presentation Slides
These slides are designed to accompany the activity portfolio. There are videos and other media linked and embedded in the presentation; if these are no longer accessible, please leave a comment so that we can find suitable substitutes.
Rubrics
Teachers may use these rubrics to assess the activities formatively or summatively.
Essay Assessment
We have used a modified IB Paper 2 rubric to assess this assignment, but any rubric designed to assess a single text literary analysis in response to a question would be a suitable instrument to evaluate the assignment.
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