Have you been in a class that a student does not pay attention to your teaching or did not know how to answer the related literature question when you asked them? You assume that maybe this student did not pay his/her attention in the class during your lesson or the strategy that you use did not attract them to the lesson. Do you know that some students do have their concerns in learning literature? Let's take a look at an example from my experience of learning literature recently. I have been asked to read a short story entitled "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. When I first read the title, I thought of the common lottery where people vote by ballot. As I kept on reading until paragraph 3, I noticed the characters in the story were farmers. The setting of the story was on 27th of June 1948 and it was in countryside.
At first, I could not imagine the story line and as a result I got lost at some points of the story. But as I read through it, I began to understand the flow of the story. I can imagine and visualize the story too. I kept on reading it until the end, and suddenly I went blank. I said to myself, 'This is it? That's the end of the story? But why? Why did it happen?'. The ending of the story was so impactful that I have decided to do some research on it.
Let's say that I put myself as a student here. As you can see, I have the first impression of the short story and at some point I struggled in reading the story. We could also put them in other words as the problems that students might encounter when reading short stories. A teacher should able to anticipate problems that students might encounter when choosing the literary works. According to Lazar (2002), she summarizes some of the problems that a group of teachers anticipate that their students would have encountered when reading a short story. Some of the problems are in the aspect of motivation, comprehension and making interpretations and these are also the problems among the Malaysian students.
We will start from the motivation aspect. The said teachers believe that the students have lack of confidence in reading the short story in English. In my opinion, they do not feel motivated enough to read the English short story is because they do not have the competency of the language itself. Other than that, the teachers also believe that the content of the story is also uninteresting to them. Some short stories do not attract them as they are quite difficult to understand in terms of the language, whether it is simple English language or classic English language. The teachers also believe that the students think that the short stories are not relevant or important for them to pass the exams in English, so they do not want to read them. Besides that, teachers also believe that the students do not read much in their own language (mother tongue / L1).
From the comprehension aspect, the teachers believe that the students would have problems in following the plot of the story. Sometimes, this happens because of the story did not follow the rules of the plot where we have the exposure, rising actions, climax, falling actions and resolution. It is just the same with the story that I have read, ''The Lottery'' where it just ended with climax and left me hanging with questions. Besides the problems of following the plot, students also might face the problems in understanding the characters, the vocabulary and the role of the narrator. About the problems of understanding the characters, not all students are exposed with other cultures besides their own culture. Thus it makes them feel lost in the story. For problems with the vocabulary, most of the time students will encounter this with the classic English literature where the language was very much different with the modern English language.
In the aspect of making interpretations, the teachers believe that the students do not have the confidence to make their own interpretations about the story. Sometimes this is happens because of the lack of creative and critical thinking skills. Besides that, the students are also believed to be coping with ambiguity about the meaning of certain words in the story. Therefore, they cannot make their own interpretations which are important in understanding the literature such as the short story. From the experience that I have encountered and the teachers beliefs about students' problems mentioned, teachers out there need to consider these problems and make plans about the strategies that they need to incorporate in their lesson of the literature said, especially short stories.
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