My Operational Definitions!

Phew, this was pretty hard and confusing but I managed to find the operational definitions for all the terms used in my research title. And here they are!

By the way my research title is

'The Effectiveness of Integrated Strategies Approach in Teaching Short Stories in ESL Classrooms"

*The highlighter terms will be defined.

Effectiveness

According to Oxford Dictionary (2005), effectiveness is defined as the degree to which something is successful in producing the result that is intended. While, according to Cambridge Dictionaries (1999), effectiveness means successful in achieving the results that you want. Additionally, effectiveness is also defined as producing result that is wanted.

From all the definitions given and to relate it for the purpose of the research, the term effectiveness actually refers to the students' improvement in understanding and learning short stories after the application of integrated strategies approach.

Integrated strategies approach

According to Divsar and Tahriri (2009), an integrated strategies approach is a linguistic approach which contain, exploring texts, stylistic analysis, literary and non-literary from the perspective of style and its relationship to content and form of the text. The integrated strategies approach also involves a very analytical and meticulous analysis of the stylistic features of a text such as  the structure of the text, the register used and also the vocabularies used in the text. This approach stresses not just to find out the meaning of the text, but how the reader themselves could suggest what it means to them. To sum it all, this suggested approach integrates reader's interpretation of the text together with the linguistic element of the text. The strategy is not as mechanical, meticulous or critical as the stylistics approach and this approach could be applied to all levels of language proficiency as long as the texts are carefully selected. A number of phases for example linguistic consideration, cultural consideration and communicative consideration need to be taken into account when teaching using the approach.

Short stories

According to Pruden (2013), the short story in structural terms is defined  as a brief fiction, ranging from 50 words to 1,700 and must contain formal plot of a storyline, namely characters, setting, climax, conflict and resolution. It also has great pedagogical potential like, questions of style, imagery, structure and narrative strategy can be addressed through a single text and, due to the length of the texts, these literary features can be taught and examined efficiently.  Teachers usually have no problem to cover entire texts and students’ level of engagement is also easily to be monitored by the teachers.

While according to Aziz (2012), short story normally contain only a single plot with non complex explanation of setting in order to give a much clearer view toward the story. Short story is always considered a workable text for the learners of English language to understand it as the plotting is usually simple and once the student started reading and understanding the text, they will start to dwell in, as  the story will build up their  interest and they will keep reading in order to know the whole storyline.

The short story that will be used for this study is “Flipping Fantastic” which is one of the selected short stories for Form Two students based on the Malaysian English curriculum syllabus.

ESL Classrooms

An ESL classroom is defined as an English classroom where English is considered dominant language but in a country which has many other nationalities. Outside the ESL classroom, normally, students will have an explicit, practical need to learn English, and ample opportunity to use the language. Students will be greatly exposed to English speaking culture, even though their proficiency level might be limited depending on their language skills (Bell, 2011). In this study, ESL classrooms are referring to the two classes that represent the two treatment groups from selected urban school and rural school.

Till then... C'ya!