Short Story Workshops as Complementary to Top Notch Series Curriculum: Content-based and Balanced Approaches

In recent years, incorporation of literature in EFL curricula has increased due to features like authenticity of materials, cultural and language enrichment, affective knowledge and creative and critical thinking opportunities. Based on the content-based approach, choice of contextualized content that takes into account students’ cultural interests and motivation is vital. Also, to the balanced approach, teaching is a research-based process with a combination of both skills-based and holistic approaches. The final aim is to turn students into self-motivated lifelong readers and writers.Different course books, despite having much comprehension, lack suitable content for Iranian teenagers, dealing more with meaning than form and lack context for grammar or vocabulary repetition. Drawing on the above approaches, this study made use of short story workshops along with a review of Top Notch series in class to provide students with depth of knowledge about grammar and writing strategies. We designed two Top Notch (3B) classes in an Iranian institute, each with 20 low intermediate students, class A as control, attending short story workshops for 12 sessions and reviewing top notch 3B for 6 sessions for the entire term. Top notch grammar was taught by 1-2 page short stories rather than by the book’s de-contextualized grammar. Class B did not go through this procedure. A comparison between the two classes through a final parallel exam showed that class A significantly outperformed class B in terms of grammar and writing abilities. Also, through a questionnaire, it was made clear that while most students in class A were more satisfied with the workshops and obtained better scores, most students of the class B were not truly satisfied with some of the Top notch contents and wished for substitute or complimentary materials.

Keywords:

: Short Story Workshop , Content-based , Balanced Approach , Top Notch