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 role-
play. 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) Reinforcement skills
2) Motivating students
3) Teaching culture
4) Teaching high-order thinking skills
5) 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 peoples customs
and traditions. Culture teaches students to understand and
respect peoples 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 childrens 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 remembered
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 accounts
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.
 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).

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.

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
support and allow students to do pre-reading activities independently. Pre-
reading 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.

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.

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 characters 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
Blooms Taxonomy, as revised by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001). They are as
follows:
Remembering: 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 characters 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?
Thank You