People Who Don’t Believe in the Power of Stories Should Think Again

Jayakaran Mukundan, Malaysia

Jayakaran Mukundan is Professor at Universiti Putra, Malaysia. He is a member of the Regional Creative Writing Group and helps with training teachers to write and publish. He is also Board Member on the Extensive Reading Foundation.
E-mail: jayakaranmukundan@yahoo.com

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Background
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4 (End of class)
The project findings
Discussion and conclusion
References

Background

For decades teachers have complained about textbooks and while some people still believe textbooks can be improved until they become more effective, others feel using other resources would be better. I believe that teachers must be made to realize that they can get their learners to invest more into their own learning by using their own resources.

I teach the materials course in the TESL (Teaching of English as a Second Language Programme) at Universiti Putra Malaysia, and in the evaluation of the textbook part of the course we critically evaluated the first unit of a Form 1 secondary school textbook which had “Family” as its theme. We evaluated it from two aspects; situational and linguistic realism. The results of the evaluation did not surprise anyone:

1. No one in the class of 43 students thought there was any realism in the unit – in fact the entire class reported that these were “unreal families” – the words used to describe the unit were – “too much harmony” ; “characters unreal”; “settings unreal”
2. No one in the class disagreed with the suggestion that the language used among the members within families was unreal (and that people rarely interacted that way)

The truth was that families in textbooks were “engineered” for a purpose – they had to incorporate agendas of the state. The agendas of the state from the Malaysian perspective include such things as the inculcation of moral values, the building of a civil society, fostering patriotism and maintaining harmony in a multi-cultural society (in Malaysia there are three main races and other ethnic minorities). Textbooks are “state-sponsored”, hence the agendas of the state are reflected in them (Mukundan,2003). In Malaysian textbooks, families (usually depicted as large, extended families) live harmoniously together, teenage children helping their parents to cook and serve lunch, helping to wash up after the meal, then in the evening playing together in the park, then having dinner and watching television together. None of the problems associated with teenage children are evident in these textbooks at all!

These agendas are transmitted via textbooks, often in an explicit manner. There is a severe lack of situational realism when textbooks are used to transmit too many messages of nationhood and civil society. Themes built around these messages may even have negative implications for learning-teaching. These themes may not engage learners, who will often perceive textbook units to be uninteresting. Many experts believe that items in textbooks that do not interest learners may not contribute effectively to their language development (Tomlinson, 2011)

As an antidote to this, I worked out alternative activities that we could use on the Unit Family. So what did I do?

Prior to the lesson I asked learners to bring into class 10 photographs that best described their families.

Part 1

For the first Unit of “Family” we started with Show and Tell. I started first, using 10 photographs that described my family (It is good for the teacher to start, especially in weaker classes, so that the teacher becomes the model and learners are aware of what is expected of them).

Next I reviewed some of the words (adjectives) that I used to describe my family. I then showed some of the photos and asked them to describe some members of my family (this was again to practice adjectives). This took about 10 minutes

Part 2

I got the students to sit in groups of four and take turns to tell the group about their family. This activity took about 15 minutes.

Part 3

Each group was asked to pick one person to come to the front to talk to the whole class about their family. This took about 15 minutes.

Part 4 (End of class)

Preparation for Project work (5 minutes) At the end of the lesson I asked students to work on a project: to produce a one-minute video clip about their family. Working on a project meant students had to spend several hours outside class hours working on their projects – from preparing storyboards to shooting videos to editing. The students took 2 weeks to work on their project.

The project findings

The results were amazing. The class videos on family were in direct contrast to what usually happens in textbook units when the “family” unit is introduced. The products of the students were posted on youtube. Some students had videos which reflected their happiness:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL95WdQPsrM

There were also students who had sad stories. There was one which was sad because of death in the family:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_jZuza04XQ

Students also seemed very comfortable talking about things generally considered “taboo” in Malaysia – like divorce: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dev2qUsRR94

I also ran a competition later (because I was inspired by their work) and had them work on another video on another theme – jealousy. I picked this as students said that this affected them most – especially within their families and in relationships. Again the results were amazing. While there was a need to work on the language aspects (sometimes poor or inaccurate use of language was annoying) I felt that it was not a concern in the early stages – I was convinced they were developing as good story-tellers. The linguistic accuracy could be attended to later.

One of the videos illustrated the bad side of sibling rivalry in tragic (and humorous) circumstances:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyRQMGHYXus
Another video had a good story to tell and appeared in the form of a documentary:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uqW6f0y5_8

Discussion and conclusion

There were notable differences when teaching “family” using the textbook and when using authentic resources. While in the textbook the students were usually exposed to reading texts on made-up families (also engineered to look unnaturally perfect), the learner’s own resources were real and they naturally had a story to tell. Another important observation about learner resources was that while there were happy families, there were sad stories in some families, usually death and divorce. And, while I did tell my students that they need not tell anything they felt uncomfortable with, many of them did get into stories about broken relationships and divorce. This was notably different from the “engineered” families in textbooks where people lived happily and death and divorce seemed like mythical happenings.

There were also other positive outcomes as a result of this movement away from the textbook:

1. The learners invested more in their own learning. Without the textbook, they initiated learning and created their own stories. They had to choose only 10 photographs (many of them had hundreds!) – a lot of decision-making came into effect. Then they had to consult their parents (especially when it came to old photos) and this required interviewing family members (and even if these were conducted in the first language it would have been, nevertheless an exposure to information-seeking procedures).
2. While some videos were individually done, some others were produced in groups. The ones which involved group work required members to play roles – some were in charge of directing, lighting, sound, etc. Students had to work collaboratively and again decision-making and consensus-seeking skills came into play.
3. All the language learning skills were in development. In the case of writing, instead of an essay a week, the students developed storyboards for their videos.
4. Students developed confidence when acting in their story videos (especially the one on “jealousy”) – many became actors, others played the role of director. Some students soon started enhancing their video-filming skills.
5. Some teachers may think that incorporating technology into students’ work would require a lot of time. This did not prove to be the case. Students stated that they used the video cameras they owned (some used their mobile phones!) and used software like Windows Movie Maker 6.0 to work on their videos. Many claimed they needed two weeks for working on their story and only 2 days to complete their video (from shooting to editing)!
6. Students actually published their work (on youtube) and this they stated, brought about a “feeling of accomplishment” and “pride”.

This was generally a type of action research – I intended to seek alternatives to textbook-driven units on “Family”. It was also my intention to see how much investment learners would put into their own learning aided by commonly available technology. What surprised me was that there was no limit to their creativity and enthusiasm, and learners enjoyed what they were doing as well as learning both life-skills and language.

References

Mukundan,J. 2003. State-sponsored textbooks: Are there hidden costs in these “free” books? The English Teacher 6/2, 133-143

Tomlinson, B. (Ed.) 2011. Materials Development in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.