Teaching Short Stories 654b4a

TEACHING SHORT STORIES ELT20703

INTRODUCTION • A short story tends to be less complex than novel. • It usually concentrates on one single incident and one finish reading it in one sitting. • Short stories allow teachers to teach the four skills to all levels of language proficiency. • Short stories if selected and exploited appropriately, provide quality text content which will greatly enhance ELT courses for students at intermediate levels of proficiency. • As short stories contain multiple layers of meaning, they can promote classroom activities that call for exchange of feelings and opinions. • Reading short stories and novels is a good exercise for enlarging students vocabulary domain of knowledge.

•For writing purposes, literature shows to set a good ground for writing practice. Having the learners complete a short story in cloze form is very encouraging. Also we can have the students write the end of a story in their own words or narrate a story from the point of view of another character in a short story, novella, or novel. Other similar creative activities can be developed for writing practice. •For speaking purposes, the events in a short story can be associated with the learners’ own experience in real life. Such a practice paves the way for hot topics for discussion in language classes. Having the students freely reflect on the events and having them critically comment is also facilitative for advancing speaking proficiency.

•For listening purposes, student can be exposed to the audio versions of the short stories. The student can be paired or grouped to orally interact with each other. •For reading purposes, short story can provide good opportunities for extensive and intensive reading. Also it is good for practicing reading subskills including skimming, scanning, and finding the main ideas. Reading in literature is a combination of reading for enjoyment and reading for information. Therefore, it bridges the lacks in non-literary texts. In fact, literature is not only facilitative for language learning purposes in general but it can also accelerate language learning in content-based instruction.

DEVELOPING STUDENTS SPEAKING SKILLS • The students read the story aloud as a chain activity. The first student reads the first sentence. The second student takes the second sentence, the third student, third sentence and so forth. Such activity will enhance students’ pronunciation and fluency in an interesting way. It is suitable for elementary class. • In an upper intermediate class, the students retell the story as a chain activity in a small groups. Each student will have a lot of opportunities to practice the relevant connectors or other discourse markers in a meaningful context.

ADVANTAGES OF USING SHORT STORIES • Provide authentic text, real language in context • Raise awareness of the target language and competence in language skills • Providing cultural information about the target language • Understand and appreciate other cultures, societies and ideologies different from their own • Encourages personal growth and intellectual development

• In advanced class, the students are grouped into two groups. The first group is assigned to prepare pros in the stories and another group prepare the cons. It can be discussion or debate. • An extending activity useful to develop students’ speaking skills and to make students more involved in the story is roleplay. This can be carried out by asking students to play the role of several characters by instructing them to act with emotions and convincing.

BENEFITS OF USING SHORT STORIES IN ESL CLASSROOM 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Reinforcement skills Motivating students Teaching culture Teaching high-order thinking skills Educating human emotion

Reinforcement Skills • Short stories enable the students to be developed in all the four language skills and activate their thinking skill. Stories should be used to reinforce ESL by discussing activities. Teachers can create such as writing and acting out dialogues.. Teachers can create a variety of writing activities to help students to develop their writing skills.

• Students become more creative since they are faced with their own point of view, that/those of the main character(s) of the story and those of their peers. This thoughtful process leads to critical thinking. Focusing on point of view in short story enlarges students' vision and fosters critical thinking by dramatizing the various ways a situation can be seen. Therefore, when students read, they interact with the text. By interacting with the text, they interpret what they read.

EXAMPLES : a.Write a dialogue between ______and the __________. b. Paraphrase the first four sentences of the paragraph. c. Summarize the story in three sentences, including the main character, setting, conflict, climax, and resolution. d. Write one sentence on the theme of the story. e. Write a paragraph on what causes people to______ f. Write a classification essay on different kinds of ________ Activities a and b are suitable for beginning levels; activities c, d, for intermediate levels; and activity f, for advanced levels.

Motivating Students • Since short stories usually have a beginning, middle and an end, they encourage students at all levels of language proficiency to continue reading them until the end to find out how the conflict is resolved. They promote motivation in the classroom. By strengthening the affective and emotional domains of students, short story develops a sense of involvement in them (Carter and Long, 1991; Collie and Slater, 1987; Lazar, 1993)

• Teachers should agree that short stories encourage students to read, and most literary texts chosen according to students’ language proficiency levels and preferences will certainly be motivating. Textbooks do not provide for any emotional and thoughtful engagement with the target language. This is because textbooks, for want of interesting and engaging content, focus the learners’ attention on the mechanical aspects of language learning. Most textbooks derived the students to a lot of anxiety, stress, de-motivation in addition to monotony and boredom.

• By selecting stories appropriate to students’ level of language proficiency, teachers avoid “frustrational reading. To choose stories according to students’ preferences, stories should have various themes because variety of themes will offer different things to many individuals’ interests and tastes. However, the themes should be “consistent with the traditions that the learners are familiar with” (Widdowson, 1983) to avoid conflicts.

Teaching Culture • Short stories transmit the culture of the people about whom the stories were written. By learning about the culture, students learn about the past and present, and about people’s customs and traditions. Culture teaches students to understand and respect people’s differences. When using literary texts, teachers must be aware that the culture of the people (if different from that of the students) for whom the text was written should be studied.

• As students face a new culture, they become more aware of their own culture. They start comparing their culture to the other culture to see whether they find similarities and/or differences between the two cultures. Misinterpretation may occur due to differences between the two cultures as Lazar (1993) explains. To avoid misinterpretation, teachers should introduce the culture to the students or ask them to find relevant information about it.

Teaching higher order thinking skills • Of all the benefits of short stories, higher-order thinking is the most exciting one. High intermediate/advanced students can analyze what they read; therefore, they start thinking critically when they read stories. Young (1996) discusses the use of children’s stories to introduce critical thinking to college students. He believes that “stories have two crucial advantages over traditional content which are : • First, because they are entertaining, students' pervasive apprehension is reduced, and they learn from the beginning that critical thinking is natural, familiar, and sometimes even fun.

• Second, the stories put issues of critical thinking in an easily ed context”. Teachers have the responsibility to help students to develop cognitive skills because everyone needs to “make judgments, be decisive, come to conclusions, synthesize information, organize, evaluate, predict, and apply knowledge.” By reading and writing, students develop their critical thinking skills. • Different stories may elicit different questions. The questions will depend on the plot, characters, conflict, climax, complications, and resolution of each story. The more questions requiring higher order-thinking students answer, the better prepared they will be to face the world once they leave schools.

Questions added to each story should train the students to think critically. Some of the questions are exemplified below:

1. In the story, “The Wisdom of Solomon,” would it have made any difference if the real mother of the baby who was about to be cut in half, had stayed quiet instead of pleading to King Solomon not to cut him and give him to the other woman?

2. What would have happened if King Solomon had not heard the real mother of the baby and cut the baby in half, giving half to the real mother and half to the other woman who claimed to be the real mother? •Questions 1 and 2 require students to think of a different end to the same story and probably see both the real mother of the baby and King Solomon in different ways from how they were portrayed in the original story. 3. Do you agree with the way King Solomon acted? Do you agree with the way the real mother acted? 4. Do you agree with the resolution of the story? Questions 3 and 4 require students to make judgement.

Educating Human Emotion • Short story educates human emotions. It does this by channelling our emotional energies and providing an emotional release. An engagement with literature exercises our senses move actively than we can otherwise achieve. Through short story, students enjoy the beauty and splendour of nature as we travel to far-away lands. We go through experiences that will not be possible in our real lives. As we read literature filled with images of action, adventure, love, hatred, violence, triumph and defeat, we create an outlet for our emotions. As a result, our perceptions of real life experiences become sharper and deeper.

• The imaginary situations students participate in through short story enable them to identify with others and their experiences. Short story helps our students enlarge their knowledge of the world. By reading about the experiences of others, students come to understand the nature of the human being. The interactions with the literary text provide ‘a living through not simply knowledge about’ the world and the experiences of human beings in it.

• It should be noted here that the generalized and impersonal s of historians, sociologists, anthropologists and even scientists could only provide our students with factual information rather than an experiential understanding of it. • In contrast, short stories can provide all this information through a dynamic and personal involvement with the experiences that are necessary to expand our students’ understanding of the information. This benefit has direct bearing on the students’ capacity to read the world, which can act as an antidote to illiteracy.

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King (2001) concludes that short stories can be utilized as engines, and a powerful and motivating source for assisting learners consolidate and practice language (grammar, diction).

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Ellis and Brewster (1991: pp. 1-2) emphasize that “as stories are motivating and fun, they can help students develop positive attitudes towards the foreign language and enrich their learning experiences”.

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Lazar (1993) believes that exposing learners to literature provides them with memorable syntactical or lexical items. Moreover, it also encourages learners to make predictions, inferences and draw conclusions about actions, behaviors of character and ends of literary works.

Pre-reading Activities Students should be encouraged to engage in pre-reading activities and to establish a purpose for reading. Well-structured pre-reading activities are most important with students who have a low level of reading proficiency. As students become more competent readers, teachers will be able to reduce the amount of and allow students to do pre-reading activities independently. Prereading activities can serve the following purposes: •Activate prior knowledge and/or provide background information necessary for comprehending the text. •Clarify cultural information that may cause comprehension difficulties. •Familiarise students with features of the genre/text type. •Encourage students to make predictions based on the title, the illustrations and/or the opening of the story.

Many teachers may also feel the need to pre-teach vocabulary before students read a short story. However, to develop students’ reading skills it is better to give students as many opportunities as possible to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words using pictorial or contextual clues. These skills can be modelled and explicitly taught in the while-reading phase.

While-reading Activities •

If students have difficulty reading an unfamiliar word aloud, do not simply feed them the correct pronunciation; instead, model for them how to use letter-sound relationships or other ‘word attack’ skills (e.g. breaking words into syllables; recognising familiar prefixes, suffixes or other word parts; making analogies with familiar words that have similar spellings) to decode, or sound out, the word.

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If students do not understand the meaning of a word, do not simply translate the word into L1 for them or ask them to look it up in the dictionary; rather, model for students how to infer the meaning of the word from the pictures or from the context. It is often possible for students to work out the part of speech of an unfamiliar word, and then to use the information that comes before and after the word to infer its meaning.

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To become more skilful readers, students should also learn how to ask questions and make predictions as they read. ‘How are these characters related?’, ‘What is this main character’s motivation?’, ‘What will happen if...?’ Reading actively by asking good questions can also be modelled by the teacher in the while-reading phase.

Post-reading Activities After students have finished reading a short story, there is a wide range of activities that teachers can design to extend student learning. One way to design post-reading activities is to refer to the different levels of thinking skills in Bloom’s Taxonomy, as revised by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001). They are as follows: •ing: Can students recognise, list, describe, identify, name or locate the main characters and events in the story? •Understanding: Can students interpret, summarise, infer, paraphrase, compare or explain the character’s motivations or the plot development? •Applying: Can students apply a lesson from the story to their own lives? •Analysing: Can students compare, organise, deconstruct, outline, structure or integrate ideas about the characters or the events in the story? •Evaluating: Can students critique or judge the story based on how successful it is in achieving its purpose, e.g. to entertain an audience? •Creating: Can students design, construct, plan or produce something new based on the characters and the events in the story?

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