JUSTIFICATION OF SHORT STORY

Story is meant for entertainment, it is use to entertain people or to help the

creativity because of the imaginary. Therefore, for the teaching materials, I had
chosen the story The Ant and The Grasshopper. It is suitable to use as the
teaching materials because the story did consider of the pedagogical principles.
Besides, the story also will easily attract the young learners since the characters
in the story are not human being which mean can help in children imagination.

To teach young learner to learn second language, there are few

pedagogical principles that should be obeyed. For Malaysian context, our second
language is English language. One of the important pedagogical principles that
should be considered in the English language programme is the literary element.
According to this principles, it said that literature is one of the important element
in learning language, therefore, the introduction of short stories, fairy tales or
fables might increased the interest of students to read the book in the target
language. It is one of the reasons that I had chosen fables The Ant and The
Grasshopper as the materials to teach Year 1 until Year 3 students in primary
school. This fable is interesting and full of moral values. By using this stories, we
can stimulate students’ cognitive. By improving students’ cognitive, we also had
considered another pedagogical principle that is intellectual development which
mean there are opportunities for students to sharpen their thinking skills. For
example, a question and answer session that conducted by a teacher might help
the young learners to think. Teacher can ask about the moral value that they had
learned from the stories, besides, students also can be given choices to choose
which character they wanted to be and why they choose the character, hence the
learners will know that to identify values that they should practice and what they
should not. This also had taken the affective principle where the children are
drawn into a story. They will dislike the negative characters and by choosing the
character, the children indirectly demonstrate their attitude toward the character.
For example, students will find that the grasshopper deserved to not be helped
by the ant because of it laziness. Students will not only improve their cognitive
but also learn to become a better person as well.

In the story, there are also many action verbs. It had provided the
opportunities to the language teacher to teach one of the components of the
grammar. Since young learners are active and like to move around, so it is
suitable for the teacher to teach the students the action of the verb to make the
students to have better understanding. While teacher says the verbs, the teacher
will act out the action. When the learners are able to understand the verbs, they
will be asked to response to the command or the words given by the teacher.
This teaching way had obeyed the pedagogical principles that offer learners
enjoyable and active roles in the learning experience, students move and
understand the language by the movement they do. A low anxiety classroom will
make the students to learn the language willingly. Learning will be more effective
in the enjoyable environment. Besides, this teaching activity also will help in
increasing and improving students listening skills. This is because the students
had to listen to the teacher’s command in order to response. Students listen and
imitate the teacher’s action. According to behaviourist, young learners will learn
best especially through imitation. When the students listen, they will automatically
follow what the teacher had said. Besides, the fun action that observed by the
learners will help in increasing students interest in learning language.