Investigating EFL Students Perspective about Using Short Stories in Teaching Writing Skill

Abstract

There is nothing more precious for second and foreign language teachers and learners than experiencing language in authentic contexts. Recently, researchers and practitioners highly advocate the use of literary genres like short stories as a kind of authentic context for teaching language skills. Due to their fascinating pedagogical aspects, benefits and implications, researchers have recommended stories as an effective teaching tool. Grounding on this effectiveness, the present paper aims to investigate the use of short stories in teaching writing from the perspective of Algerian EFL students. It also examines their writing profile including their proficiencies, experiences, difficulties and strategies. The study targets answering two questions: 1. What is students’ writing profile? 2. What is students’ perspective about using short stories to teach writing? The study is conducted in the context of an Algerian university with sixty-nine third year students and makes use of a diagnostic test and a questionnaire. The obtained results indicate that writing proves to be a problem for the majority of students as they encounter serious difficulties in mechanics, vocabularies and ideas. Results also reveal that students do have positive attitudes towards using stories in teaching writing despite their poor experience and average proficiency in narrative genre writing. The study highly recommends the integration of literary genres like short stories into the English academic curriculum. The study findings, however, are thought to be directive for determining EFL students writing preferences and attitudes to conduct further research on appropriate strategies and programs to integrate short stories in teaching writing.