Short Stories in ELT Classes is a book which consists of ten widely known short stories in literature. The stories were purposefully chosen as they were suitable to enhance the critical thinking skills (comprehension, analysis, evaluation and synthesis) of students in ELT (English Language Teaching) classes. Although the main notion that the initial goal of ELT is to provide students opportunities to develop language competence, the new trends in second language teaching indicates the significance of integrating literary texts in ELT classes at colleges and universities. Literature, particularly short stories, are authentic texts that enhance students’ language skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening. In this book, each story was designed with –pre, while and –post reading questions and activities. While presenting universal themes such as morality, relationships, compassion, sacrifice, free will, equality, charity, maturity and experience, the stories in Short Stories in ELT Classes aims at providing

educators and teachers materials and texts to increase students’ awareness with class discussions and debates.

Drawing on recent posthumanist theories that promote a non-anthropocentric perspective, this study examines the works of contemporary British poets Mario Petrucci and Alice Oswald. It is argued that their poetry can be described as posthuman poetry, which envisions posthuman spaces of becoming where human and nonhuman worlds coexist on a non-hierarchical basis. Petrucci’s engagement with ecocritical crises in the Anthropocene underscores the limits of human agency, and it foregrounds destructive impact of human actions on the ecosystem. In a posthuman context, therefore, Petrucci problematises the human/nonhuman binary by representing the erosion of the anthropocentric worldview in the face of environmental crises such as deforestation, global warming, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Bosco (1999), Heavy Water: A Poem for Chernobyl (2004) and Half Life: Poems for Chernobyl (2004). In these collections, challenging the perception of nonhuman matter as passive, Petrucci emphasises the agency of trees and radioactive particles. Similarly, Alice Oswald moves the reader beyond the human-centred treatment of the natural world. Rejecting human exceptionalism, Oswald’s Dart (2002) presents a polyphonic meshwork where the voices of alternating human speakers and the River Dart interweave within a posthuman space. Representing the intersubjective and dialogic exchanges between the human and nonhuman inhabitants of the Severn Estuary and the lunar cycle, Oswald’s A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009) further problematises the subject/object binary by creating a posthuman space of becoming grounded in a communicative framework. Hence, bringing Petrucci and Oswald together, this study draws attention to trans-corporeal and polyphonic entanglements of human-nonhuman, subject-object and self-other non-binaries, and it aims to show how poetry, as a literary medium, can contribute to questioning and transforming the anthropocentric vision of humankind in the contemporary world.