Final entry

Throughout the semester we have been exposed to many kinds of literary texts and methods of teaching them. My personal opinion says that some of texts are a little bit difficult for the students to handle, for example, the inaugural speech. I was never exposed to speeches before. So I guess it will be a challenge to teach the student something that is out of their context of learning. On the other hand, the use of songs and lyrics are very helpful. Students get excited and motivated every time when songs and lyrics are involved. If the singing can boost up their moral, confidence and interest towards the language, why not we use it in class? All the tasks and group work is a new experience to me. This is the first time I am working the members of my group. For seven semesters I have not once did any group assignments with Iskandar, Fazlina, Zafira or Mimi. Their way of doing group assignment of course differs from the people that I usually work with but I had so much fun with them. They were a little bit playful, but are committed in their works. Thanks you friends for the new experience that we had together. And last but not least, thank you to Ms Dzeelfa for the hardship and effort that you put yourself into to ensure that the class is interesting. I thought the class would be as boring as other literature class, but you have made it our most interesting literature class ever.

Dialogue- performance of the contemporary version of Pyramus and Thisbee

We have come up with our version of Pyramus and Thisbee. Personally, I think it was kind of stupid but hilarious. We decided to take the secret meeting scene and make a contemporary version of that scene. We sat as a group but still, ideas seem to avoid us. Then Ami came up with this idea of changing the blood on Thisbee’s veil to menstrual blood. This is the part that sounds stupid, all of us agreed that it is stupid but at the same time it is hilarious. We could actually imagine the whole class reaction towards our version of the story. Well, as expected, the class burst into laughter and the loudest was from Yuen Thien. Maybe it was not because of the dialogue after all, maybe because it was performed by Ami and I. once again, I made a fool of myself but honestly, I enjoyed it so much. As I said in my earlier posting, the students might face a challenge in writing their version of the story, but I feel that they would love to perform it to the class. Most of the students they like to show their talent to their teachers. Once the teacher said that they need to write something, they would definitely tend to shut down and avoid the task. The teacher needs to grab their attention by asking them to do things that most students love to do-perform in front of the class. It would be a bonus if the teacher feels that their performance is good enough to be performed during the school’s special occasion. This will be a moral booster for them to work harder in class.

Dialogue- Based on Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbee

We were all asked to read an extract entitled Pyramus and Thisbee. Looking at the title, it sounds so boring…Thisbee??? Out of the many names in the world, why Thisbee? It sounds like someone who can’t pronounce the consonant ‘s’. Anyway, after reading the extract, we were asked to form a group of six and came up with the contemporary version of Pyramus and Thisbee. This is the most challenging yet interesting part. We can change the story the way we like it. But there was one problem. We were required to perform our version in front of the class. Writing a new version is not much a problem, but performing the newly written version is so not my league. I’m just not a good actress. I usually make a fool of myself every time I performed in the class. But this is a requirement, so not much that I can say. I guess I just have to go with the flow. Adapting this activity in the language classroom would be something new and interesting but I doubt whether the students would be able to write a contemporary version of the story. Perhaps students with higher proficiency level would be able to this well, but the students who are not comfortable with English; they would find this activity as a threat to them

Song lyrics- activities

My group have decided to use the song entitle You Belong with Me by Taylor Swift to teach the short story entitle Cinderella Girl. We have come up with three activities. The first activity is during the while reading stage. The students are required to underline the differences of the two girls mentioned in the lyric. The other two activities are for during the post-reading activity. The first activity requires the students to draw an anti-war poster and the second activity requires the students to express their feeling in a form of stem poem. After presenting the activities that we have designed to the class, we felt that some changes need to be done in order to make the exercise more comprehensible to the students. Students with higher proficiency would be able to do the activity but the lower proficiency students might face some problems in doing the activities.

Song lyrics

Out of all the topics that we did throughout the semester, this is the most interesting topic indeed. Songs are something that is common to us, and almost everyday we listen to a song. So when we were asked to choose an appropriate song to teach a literary text, we were all excited! All of my group members have many songs in carved or printed in their head, all the new songs. I am the only one who still listens to ABBA, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. I felt like I was in the dinosaur’s era when I did not recognize any of the songs that they were all excited about. Gosh, how outdated I am! I guess I need to polish myself and listen to new songs if I were needed to use songs in the classroom. Definitely the students don’t listen to my kind of songs, and I don’t listen to their kind of songs. So, after the cats-and-dogs discussion, we decided to use the text entitle Cinderella Girl by Vivien Cook and the song entitles You Belong with Me by Taylor Swift. This activity made me realized that using songs in the classroom can be very interesting because it can grab the students’ attention towards their learning.

Jigsaw reading- Malcom X

This time around we were asked to work in groups, but not in the same group that we did all the assignments before. We were not allowed to choose our group members. Each of my group members were put into different groups and in that group we need to work on an extract from a text. Each group were given a part of the text about Malcolm X. Ms Dzeelfa said that we were going to do jumble reading, which means we will be working on a long text, and the text will be divided into parts. Each group will get a part or an extract from the text, and we need to read and understand it. Then, we were asked to form back our usual group and discuss about the different parts of the text. At first, I was reluctant to do this task because I really don’t like to read long literally text, especially from Malcom X! How interesting could it be? After I read my part in my newly performed group, I fully understood the extract that I read. Then when I got back into my usual group, we discussed about each of the different extract, and guess what? I finally understand what the whole text was about without reading it! I really like this method. I mean, it saves our time a lot. I don’t have to crack my head reading all those stuff about Malcom X. In my opinion, this kind of method will probably work best in school, especially when you are teaching a very long text. If I got bored reading long text, just imagine how the students would feel about long text. This method somehow will definitely help them in understanding a long text without having them to finish reading the text.

Speech-inaugural, implication towards students

Honestly, I am pretty sure that I was not introduced to inaugural speech during my school days. The only speeches that we looked into were speeches during school assembly or sports day. Thus I personally think that the teaching of inaugural speech to students would be a little bit boring as the subject and the content of the speech are more serious, and students don’t really understand the necessity of learning the speech. To the teacher, the content of the speech might not be so important but emphasize is put more on the presentation of the speech. But students rarely understood this, and they tend to shut down when they feel the content is boring. So I strongly feel that as a teacher, perhaps the teaching of this type of speech is suitable for pre-university students as to prepare them for the university style of learning but to incorporate the inaugural speech in the English language classroom would require a lot of effort from the teacher to ensure the learning would bored the students.