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How to Use Short Stories to Teach English Do NOT copy this page!!! in a Humanizing, Dignifying, and Meaningful Way

A Checklist by George Bradford Patterson II

Short stories may be utilized as a very helpful and inspiring literary device to teach English language skills in a humanizing, dignifying, and meaningful way in the EFL/ESL class and promote human rights, justice, dignity, and intercultural understanding.

The use of this device has become more obvious and important in light of the increasing interest in peace through the interest group TESOLers for Social Responsibility (TSR) and the human-improving role of applied linguists:

There is an increasing stress and tendency for TESOL professionals to participate in applications of peace linguistics. Peace linguistics may be defined by a pioneering entry on that emerging area by David Crystal (1999):

An approach which emerged during the 1990s among many linguists and language teachers in which linguistic principles, methods, findings and applications were seen as a means of promoting peace and human rights at a global level.

It emphasizes the linguistic value of diversity and multilingualism. (254)

Along the same lines, short stories can be utilized as an innovative device by humanistic teachers for dignifying and edifying learning experiences.

Following is a checklist (partially adapted from Francisco Gomes de Matos's (2004) checklist "Are You a Humanizer?") for EFL/ESL teachers to utilize short stories as an innovative device to teach English language skills in a humanizing and meaningful way:

1. Make use of short stories that emphasize such values as human rights, justice, peace, dignity, courage, reconciliation, forgiveness, compassion, mercy, and repentance.

Have the students look for symbols, themes, imagery, moods, tones, epiphanies, character development, plots, subplots, ironies, foreshadowing/suspense, and aftershadowing to illustrate these values.

2. Then have them write short stories to illustrate values.

They can do this as an individual class exercise and also at home.

Have them identify symbols, themes, imagery, moods, tones, settings, epiphanies, foreshadowing, and aftershadowing.

Have them read passages in their short stories that illustrate these literary devices.

Then have them do this as a small-group exercise.

3. Have them discuss how the short story enables them to grow personally, socially, intraculturally, and interculturally on a group and individual level.

Have volunteers provide examples to the class.

As a follow-up exercise, have them write summaries or essays explaining these points of growth.

They can do this as a group and individual exercise.

Then they can do this as a homework exercise.

They can also do it in a second language learning context.

4. Encourage the students to apply human communicative rights in the classroom short-story exercise by asserting their right to hear (what is being said by other members of the classroom community) and their right to be heard and to make certain that the students fulfill their corresponding communicative responsibilities.

5. Adapt/change portions of short stories so that they contribute to personal or group humanization, including having them write epiphanies.

Epiphanies (Hills, 1977, 17) are both a kind of experience and also a literary genre-both a way of seeing or hearing and a way of demonstrating and writing.

Some epiphanies may be an artistic creation-in fact, a sort of poetic-prose statement-whereas others appear to be transcriptions of actual life, albeit recorded, of course, with extreme care.

In such a case, the crucial questions would be: What has to be changed in the short story(s) in such and such a lesson so that language learning can become a profoundly humanizing and meaningful experience.

How can that be actualized?

This exercise can be done as a group, individual, whole-class, or homework exercise.

6. As the students discuss and write these short stories, encourage them to adopt and sustain a positive view of the language and culture of that short story.

In addition, make use of English translations by Nobel literary laureates such as Miguel Angel Asturias and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other great writers such as Isabel Allende and Jorge Luis Borges, the greatest short-story writer in the history of Latin America.

7. Also, use classroom short-story exercises to facilitate the creation of humanizing, peace-building, peace-enhancing, and peace-promoting activities so that learners improve their competence as caring and compassionate language learners/users.

Have the students explore how these short stories can contribute to humanizing, dignifying, and meaningful activities that can serve as a bridge for peace, justice, human rights, and intercultural understanding in regional conflicts such as in Mindanao in the Philippines, Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Ivory Coast, Palestine-Israel, Lebanon, Chechnya, and Northern Ireland.

8. Employ the short-story exercises to help the students probe language resources, especially vocabulary, in small groups and pairs.

Through investing in vocabulary, students can reap the fruits of humanizing dividends on a short-term and long-term basis.

The corresponding vital question would be How can the learning of vocabulary from short stories contribute to reinforcing learners' sense of self-respect, self-esteem, mutual respect, and dignity?

9. Have the students use the Internet in a humanizing way by searching for meaningful, dignifying, and humanizing short stories by Nobel laureates such as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Isabel Allende.

Then have the students communicate with each other by e-mail in discussing the short stories of these writers.

Have them compare and contrast the short stories of these writers.

The use of short stories as an innovative device to teach English language skills to EFL/ESL students and second language skills of other second languages to second language learners can reinforce the teaching of these language skills in a humanizing, meaningful, and dignifying way by:

Challenging students to cultivate and sustain an awareness of their responsibility as peace patriots through their employment of English and of their first language and other languages in which they are fluent.

Sensitizing learners to the awareness of language used not only for interacting but also for expressing the feeling of loving one's linguistic neighbor. . Challenging student to create peace-promoting mini-glossaries for employment in different professions, such as tourism and management, law, medicine, journalism, and engineering.

Challenging students to exchange peace-enhancing sustaining statements, proverbs, allegories, vignettes, and quotations with learners both intraculturally and cross-culturally.

Challenging students to identify insensitive uses of English in the media (press/television/movies) and in fictional works and to replace such objectionable expressions with humanizingly rendered language. (Gomes de Matos, 2002)

Therefore, the short story is definitely a superb innovative device to teach English language skills to EFL/ESL students and also language skills of other second languages to second language learners in a humanizing, dignifying, and meaningful way.

The author George Bradford Patterson II is a North American originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is currently residing in the Philippines finishing his Ph. D dissertation in "TURN-TAKING IN ENGLISH CONVERSATION IN SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS at the University of the Philippines, Diliman in the College of Education in the Language Area. He has a Masters Degree in Teaching English as a Second Language from Rutgers - The State University of New Jersey from the Graduate School of Education , Dept. Language and Learning in New Brunswick in May, 1982. He also did his BA in January, 1974 at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Later, he did a post graduate major in Spanish. He has taught EFL/ESL in Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Honduras, China, and Korea in universities, language institutes, binational centers, and international school. He is also a bilingual poet, having published two books of poetry in Spanish in Santiago, Chile through the Editorial Fertil Provincia and one book of bilinguial book of poetry in English and Spanish in the Philippines. He is also a short writer and essayist and has traveled, worked, and studied in the Philippines, China, Thailand, Singapore, India, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru. Brand New Routes

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