Álvarez Gilda- Belitsky Gabriela- Busto Riquelme Daniela. Isfd n° 30 LENGUA Y EXPRESIÓN ESCRITA IV. PROFESOR: BLAS BIGATTI
The devil you know or the devil you don’t know: choosing readers in the EFL classroom Abstract. Based on the assumption that students are willing to read stories known beforehand, a survey was carried out within a focus group of 64 students aged 13-14. The results portrayed that our hypothesis was proved, suggesting that students enjoy to read a story they have approached previously in their mother tongue. This does away with the typical supposition of many teachers that those kinds of stories will bore students.
The current Argentinean National Curriculum makes emphasis on contents organized around the Communicative Approach. This approach focuses on the English language as tool for international communication and as a link to connect with other cultures through literature. The public educational document previously mentioned deals with several axes among others. The communicative one gives students the opportunity to connect and enjoy diverse literary texts belonging to different genres, such as poetry, tales, novels and theatre in their original language (Diseño curricular. Educación secundaria, 2007.). Nowadays, literature is being used more intensively in English classrooms due to the tendency to prevail the Communicative as the main approach in the teaching of English in foreign language classrooms. That’s why teachers have to decide and analyse the type of texts they will make use to approach students to reading. It is through this selection and analysis of texts that we realized about the current tendency in TEFOL. Looking for stories to work with during the year, one of the researchers in this paper started a careful exploration on short stories that could be appealing to students. She went to a book shop and found an attractive shelf filled with readers based on well know movies. She bought some of those readers taking for granted that they could be useful just to focus on some fragments and to carry out activities related to the films. The plan was not to read the stories completely because students knew the plot already and it would be boring. Surprisingly while dealing with “Pirates of the Caribbean: the course of the black pearl” the teacher noticed that students were not bored, quite the contrary, they were engaged on the reading activities proposed and disposed to a further reading of the story. After this experience we can state that there seems to be a tendency to look for brand new stories to present to the students. This is mainly because we, teachers, assume that what is familiar will be boring and what is unknown will be interesting. Written on the basis of a survey risen on students’ likes and dislikes on the reading field, this paper is presented as an attempt to get rid of that typical assumption. Methodology A survey containing three questions was designed in order to find out students’ preferences as regards reading in the English classroom (see appendix I). 64 students aged 1314 from Moreno, Buenos Aires were asked to answer the survey. They attend 2 nd year at two different private schools in working class areas. Students were asked to answer three questions. In the first one, they have to state whether they preferred reading a story they