Teaching the Three Little Pigs to EFL Young
Learners in Indonesian
Three Little Pigs was taught to
EFL kindergarten students in Tainan City in Indonesian. All the
students had already studied English in private language institutes. And
therefore, pre-test and post-test were needed to understand how much students
learned in our teaching experiment.
Before teaching, it took us, me
and my teaching assistant, five weeks to prepare for this teaching experiment,
including finding one appropriate fairy
tale, designing speaking and listening tests for pre-test and post-test,
contacting any school for participating in this experiment, and arranging
teaching schedule. Moreover, we adapted our storybook to fit those young
learners' English levels and designing lesson plans.
I recorded and observed the class by reflection
notes, DVD, and students' scores from speaking and listening tests. In order to
know the effect of this teaching experiment on young learners' English
listening and speaking, a dependent t-test was utilize to reveal the difference
between pre-test and post-test.
The Effects of Using Multiple
Techniques on Teaching
In the practical teaching, the
utilization of multiple teaching techniques in teaching repetitive sentence patterns and rhythmic refrains of the folktale
had strong effect on teaching young learners English listening and speaking. It
indicates that it is effective for teachers to apply multiple ways to present
folktales in order that young learners would be interested in and be familiar
with the story content. Firstly, students got great improvement in listening as
well as in speaking. Furthermore, young learners were comfortable with familiar
folktales, which could decrease their anxiety. Some students seemed very
nervous before starting learning English. It was very obvious that they looked
relaxed when they knew that they wanted to learn the story, Three
Little Pigs.
In addition, the story interested young
learners so that they would absorb
themselves in the story content. For instance, every time when the puppet, the
big wolf showed up, young learners were nervous but excited. They would be
eager to talk and participate in class. They enjoyed imitating the voice of the big wolf, too.
Moreover, playing puppets could stimulate
them to be excited and to be willing to participate in role-playing. When the
teaching assistant played the puppets, students would particularly pay
attention to her and do role-play with her. For instance, when she said,
"Please give me some bricks. I want
to...," they would automatically say, "build a new house."
Although some sentences were too long
for young learners to learn, it was effective to break down long sentences into
prosodic elements for students to learn. Then the students were taught to chant
and sing, such as "In! In! Come in! Let me come in. Little pig, little
pig, let me come in." "Puff! Puff! Blow your house down." They
easily memorized and retained the content through chanting and singing. The
finding supports that choral speaking/chanting is a safe way and an interesting
activity (Cross, 1999; Cullinan & Galda, 1994; Hill, 1999; Richard-Amato,
1988; Rothlein & Meinbach, 1991).
Doing action, which young learners
enjoyed very much, was also a stimulating tool to remind them of the content.
With this fun action activity, they could be more familiar with the music and
sing songs better. It's more fun than reading aloud only; therefore, young
learners had such high participating in class. For example, when the teaching
assistant played music, they would start to sing and do the action
automatically.
Last, the teaching assistant helped the
children to identify repetitive lines and to point out repetitive words. She
further motivated children to recognize rhyming words and elicit them to reproduce the repetitive words by playing games.
Glossary:
Fairy : dongen
Tale : cerita
Repetitive : berulang
Refrains : bagian ulangan
Folktale : dongen rakyat
Absorb : menahan
Imitating : meniru
Bricks : menembok
Elicit : memperoleh
Exercise:
1.
What is needed to understand how students learn in a teaching experiment?
2.
How long will it take to prepare for trial teaching experiment?
3.
What affect that caused the students to apply various teaching techniques of folklore?
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