How Stories ‘work’ As the English Teaching-Learning Sources
A teacher is called creative when she/he engages novel as the methods, and/or materials, and/or technology to teach the students (Maley and Kiss, 2017).
Since I was a child, my parents always tried to introduce and expose me to English. They read me a variety of tales, one of them entitled Little Red Riding Hood. Then when I grew up, it might be in middle school, I reread the same story by myself and started to learn much more new words from it. That was the time when literary works began to become one of my main sources to learn English. In my senior high school life, I challenged myself to read the non-translated version of the first series of Harry Potter, which I borrowed from the school’s library. Even in the end, I could not finish it, though. Fortunately, this series of Harry Potter has the movie version, then I knew the rest of the stories from the movie. Recently, I read a tale book called Tashi. From the book I learned abundant new words and phrases I have never known before, for instance, the word fetch, scatter, fritter, etc., the phrase tore off, loose upon, we are dying to, set off, etc. As I read, I used a pencil to highlight unfamiliar words or phrases and write them my notebook. Before I looked up the words in my dictionary, I tried to work out what they might be mean based on the context of the story. During enjoying the stories, frequently, I try to pay more attention to how the writer uses words and constructions in English. As novels and stories use both formal and informal language, they are often filled with everyday English expressions. Therefore, I able to adopt them in my daily life. At this period, I’m listening to the audiobook version of The Alchemist, a novel by Paulo Coelho. Besides being able to enjoy great stories, through listening to an audio novel we can learn new vocabularies and their pronunciation at one blow. According to the good things of literary works as the media of learning English, teachers should try to implement this method in their class.
A teacher is called creative when she/he engages novel as the methods, and/or materials, and/or technology to teach the students (Maley, Alan and Kiss, Tamas, 2017). However, exploiting literature texts, especially novels and stories as the media of teaching language, could be not efficient if teachers choose inappropriate levels of sources for the learners and do not pay attention to students’ creative process. Find interesting and right-level sources become the main focus for the teacher.
For elementary students, for example, the teacher can use a book of very short stories or tales with more pictures like Little Red Riding Hood. The students are being asked to analyze neither the language/grammatical structure nor the literature itself, but they are being ordered to express emotions, feelings, and simple life lessons of the story instead. After reading the text altogether, the teacher sticks up some stickers on the cupboard about various emotions and life lessons, then students choose a few that declare their feelings after reading some parts of the story (being chosen by the teacher) and the whole story. The teacher also can take some words or phrases from the story and link them to the materials. For example, we took the words rise, scissor, house, dress, hood, sky, honey, etc., to start teaching countable and uncountable nouns.
At a higher level, for middle schoolers, we can raise up the standard of the learning materials. It is better if we still use short stories but with wider topics and harder activities, since “there is a bigger possibility that a novel has a larger cast of characters than the short story, more complex plot and more complicated methods of narration as well” (Lazar, Gillian, 1993). The teacher gives one example, then explains the elements of the short story. Next, students are divided into some groups with three, then the teacher gives several sets of theme and situation with pictures, afterward, each group choose a set and make their own short story. The story must contain the structure of the plot (that has been thought before) and at least consist of four paragraphs. After students submit their works, students are asked to find and write down any modal verbs, adjectives, and adverbs from the other group’s task.
In senior high school, teachers are allowed to explore more literature as their teaching method/ material. Students can determine their own learning sources in the form of a novel. In senior high school, teachers are allowed to explore more literature as their teaching method/ material. Students can determine their own learning sources in the form of a novel that aims to help students to discover independent ways to get into a text systematically. As Maley (2019) stated that “The personal growth model stresses the personal enjoyment and emotional gain students can procure by engaging with such texts”. The teacher tells students to read 3 chapters of the novel and try to analyze and make drafts of the tenses that the novel uses. The class is divided into some small teams, each group is given one chapter from a novel and being commanded to find out gerunds and to-infinitives from the text. During the two semesters, students are asked to read a novel consistently and write down words, phrases, and/or clauses that they have learned from the novel. A copy of the work will be submitted at the end of the semester.
Those are a few examples of applying for literary works mainly short stories and novels as the teaching language approaches. Teachers can obtain numerous benefits by using literary works as sources.
Sources:
Maley, Alan. 2019. Literature in the language classroom. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511667206.027.
Maley, Alan and Kiss, Tamas. 2017. Creativity and English Language Teaching from Inspiration to Implementation. Palgrave Macmillan.
Lazar, Gillian. 1993. Literature and Language Teaching: A guide for teachers and trainers. Cambridge University Press.
