Oral Literature – JSS1 English Lesson Note (First Term)

Oral literature is made up of songs, stories and other sayings that people have heard, sung and told without any intervention of writing. The creator or transmitter sings or tells it, and the receiver hears it. Epics, ballads, prose tales, ritual songs and lyric songs existed orally before writing was invented.

Behavioural objectives

By the end of the lesson, students should be able to:

• state what oral literature is;
• name some genres of oral literature;
• explain why carefully structured oral expression can be called literature;
• explain what is meant by saying that oral literature is both oral and aural.

The nature and kinds of oral literature

Did literature exist before writing?

Epics, ballads, prose tales, ritual and lyric songs, as genres, existed orally before writing was invented. We do not have a special word to designate them before they were manifested in writing, so we are left with the paradox of “oral literature.”

But if literature can be defined as “carefully constructed verbal expression,” carefully structured oral verbal expression can surely qualify as literature. This is common sense. People did not wait until there was writing before they told stories and sang songs.

Moreover, when these genres first appeared in writing, their metric base, their poetic and compositional devices, were already fully developed. None of them could have been invented by any one person at any one time. They are too complicated for that.

What is oral literature?

Oral literature, then, consists of the songs, stories and other sayings that people have heard and listened to, sung and told, without any intervention of writing. The creator or transmitter did not write the song or the story but sang or told it. The receiver did not read the song or story but heard it.

These stories and songs are therefore oral and aural: they are told, and they are also heard.

Evaluation

1. What is oral literature?
2. Name three genres of oral literature.
3. Why can carefully structured oral expression be called literature?
4. What is the difference between “oral” and “aural”?

Assignment

In your exercise book, write a short paragraph explaining why people did not need writing before they could tell stories and sing songs. Use points from today’s lesson.