A Method of Teaching English through Stories

English includes four skills which are important for English learners. Those skills are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Unfortunately, many English learners, especially junior high school students, feel that those skills are hard to be accomplished. That makes them dislike English even stop learning English. Therefore, junior high school’s English teachers are trying to find many innovations and interesting methods in teaching English to make students acquire those important skills. One of the ways they found is using stories in the teaching process which can be divided into three main steps: preparation step, class activity, and evaluation step.

            The first step is preparation. In this step, teachers look for two stories that can be children stories or short stories such as Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and so forth. Why do we use stories? It is because people are familiar with stories, including young people. They like listening to stories even read them. After finding stories that will be used in teaching process, teachers should copy one of two stories as many as the number of students in the class. Teachers have to make sure that each student will get a copy of the stories because it will make the teaching process more effective than one copy is used by two or more students.

Then, after the preparation step is conducted, we go to the second step which is class activity. In the class, when all students are ready to learn, teachers will read aloud one of the stories to the whole class and students must listen carefully to what the teachers say. It will train them in listening comprehension that will improve their listening skills. After finishing reading the story, teachers will ask the students’ comments about the story that have been read, about what that they can get from the story. It will make the teachers know the listening and speaking skills of the students. Teachers can also make a correction for the students’ pronunciation. After all the students give their comments, teachers will give the copies of the other story to them, one copy for each. Then, teachers will give them time to read by themselves for the next three minutes and after that, teachers will call their names one by one in turn to read aloud the passages of the story to the class. This activity will improve their reading skills in terms of the time in reading, understanding, and re-reading the text.

When each student has his/her turn in reading the story aloud, we come to the last step that is evaluation step. In this step, teachers will review the whole activity that they have done. Then, as the assignment and their practice, teachers will ask the students to make their own stories in their home. The assignment will be submitted in the next meeting. This assignment will help teachers to know the students ability in writing. In addition, students will practice their writing skill and make some improvements to that.

From the process above, we can conclude that stories teaching method can help the students to acquire the important skills in learning English which are listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. Besides, this method is interesting enough to be implemented in class for people who like stories a lot. Hence, as teachers to be, we should try to implement this method to our students to make the learning process more interesting and to make them do not stop learning English.

By Wahyu Kartika Wienanda and Ninuk Retna Sumiarsih