Teaching English Literature to Digital Natives with special reference to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

This paper is an extension of the workshop titled Learning English Language, Literature and Critical thinking for Digital Natives I conducted at the UGC sponsored symposium on Learning English in the Glocalised World organized by the PG and Research Department of English, Vellalar College for Women (Autonomous), Erode, India on 24^th January 2019 for the PG Students and Research Scholars of the region. Digital Natives are the children who were born since the last two decades of the 20^th century when the world has been filled with computers, videogames, digital music players, cell phones, and myriads of technological toys and gadgets. The advent of the technological era has resulted in a dichotomy in the academic world which is the digital natives being taught by Digital Immigrant teachers i.e., the teachers who were born before the 1980s and immigrated into the world of modern technology. There are many clashes between the approaches of the teachers and the preferred learning styles of the learners. To bridge these gaps between them, the use of Internet Communication Technology is a viable solution. The need for incorporating ICT is a necessity in English Literature courses too. Having understood the need for incorporating internet-based technology into teaching, this paper explores various ways in which literature teaching can be enhanced using ICT to meet the learning needs of the digital native students. English literature courses are offered in most Arts colleges and Universities in India. The growing demand for these courses among young generations is not just passion driven but also because of the worldwide career scope they offer in various fields including teaching.