Using fairy tales to motivate students’interests and the effectiveness in learning writing

DEPARTMENT OF THANH HOA EDUCATION AND TRAINING
DIVISION OF NGOC LAC EDUCATION AND TRAINING
THE EXPERIENCED INITIATIVE
USING FAIRY TALES TO MOTIVATE STUDENTS’INTERESTS AND THE EFFECTIVENESS IN LEARNING WRITING
Performer: 	Đàm Thị Thúy
Position:  	 Teacher
School unit:  Kien Tho Secondary School
Field:  	 English
THANH HOA, 2016
Part I
Introduction
1. Statements of the problem
	Writing is one of the four skills in learning English. It is a big obstacle to not only teachers but students as well; especially students come from mountainous areas where the learning equipment and conditions is far too inadequate. Moreover, writing skills need lots of requirements such as grammatical rules, vocabulary, creative, imagination, etc. 
It is true that many language teachers have difficulties to find good ways which are not only interesting but also challenging enough to encourage students to learn writing. Most of the learners consider that they usually meet troubles in mastering writing skills. Normally, they feel writing lessons create a boring and monotonous classroom atmosphere which can discourage language learners from participating actively during the teaching-learning process. Moreover, students of Kien Tho Secondary School mainly come from countryside, thus the learning environment is not beneficial for them to practice their language skills. This has a great influence on students’ competence. In order to actively engage language learners in the learning process, teachers should provide a supportive environment in which students can learn language skills in a meaningful context. Giving students real-life situations in which the language is used naturally will stimulate them to express their ideas and raise their motivation in learning. In other words, their critical thinking and participation will eventually increase. 
 Once, when teaching the fairy tales “The lost shoe” and “How the tiger got his stripes” in the text book English 8, issued by Vietnam Education Publishing House, I found that most of the students became much eager and interested in learning. As a result, the writing lesson was no longer stressful and my students were more than willing to do the writing tasks. That is because fairy tales help enhance the memory, stimulate the imagination and emotions and associate ideas. In addition, fairy tales are short enough and also rich in terms of vocabulary, less grammatically and syntactically complex than many other forms of text in order to keep students interested in writing not only simple sentences but the whole passage as well. Furthermore, according to King (2001: 2), “stories encourage students’ participation and student-centered learning; students may not only interact with each story through a series of right-brain activities, but stories also have an exponential quality in that they stimulate the telling of more stories”. Finally, these stories are so closely familiar that they can be adaptable to many types of students with different levels.
Although fairy tales are not widely used in the English curriculum in secondary schools, they are very interesting, understandable and useful in developing students’ language skills in class. The results of this initiative will bring practical benefits to teaching English, especially teaching writing. Firstly, the initiative will bring insights into the writing skill development of students in the 8th class at Kien Tho Secondary School in Ngoc Lac. Secondly, the initiative will help me suggest a better way to improve students’ writing skills in certain contexts. Thirdly, the initiative will prove that fairy tales as an aid increase the effectiveness of teaching writing skill for students. Finally, the initiative will be a helpful suggestion to make students keen on learning and the writing lessons will be more interesting and effective. 
In short, using of fairy tales in teaching writing is an effective way of enhancing learner’s ability to develop practical and creative skills. Not only will students be developing their writing while writing their own fairy tales, but they will have comfortable and enjoyable moments as a useful motivation during the lesson as well. That is why I have decided on choosing “Using fairy tales to motivate students’ interests and effectiveness in learning writing ” as the topic of my experienced initiative. 
2. Objectives of the study 
Being a secondary school teacher, I realize that most of my students face many problems in learning writing. This is due to the fact that writing lessons are so boring and difficult that students often feel tired and stressed. Therefore, it is essential for a teacher to find out effective teaching methods to make the lessons more interesting and understandable so that s/he can attract students’ attention and help them improve their writing proficiency as well. That is why the objectives of my initiative are:
 To raise students’ interests and find out the effectiveness of using fairy tales in learning writing
 To make suggestions to using fairy tales in teaching writing.
3. The setting and subjects of the study
The study has been conducted on the 60 eighth-grade students at Kien Tho Secondary School in Thanh Hoa where I have been teaching. They all come from rural area and have two-year experience in learning English, therefore, the difference of their writing competence level is not considerable. 
 Unlike the English instruction program for the 6th and 7th graders, the 8th ones have to study language skills separately. Because of the difficulty and the complexity of a great amount of knowledge of vocabulary, grammar rules, syntax and so forth, writing skill is normally assigned in the end of each unit in the textbook.
In the first term of the eighth grade, students have studied some familiar fairy tales like “The lost shoe” and “How the tiger got his stripes” which were translated into Vietnamese. Therefore, it is helpful for them to understand and analyze and employ these stories into different tasks of writing such as completing the passage, giving the correct forms of verbs, writing up sentences, writing a summary or another ending for the story.
4. Methods and data collection instruments
	The initiative aims at exploring students’ opinions about using fairy tales and their effectiveness in teaching writing and measuring the writing activities for students through fairy tales, therefore I tend to use the interview, questionnaires and tests as useful tools for my study. The combination of different instruments used in this initiative would help to gain reliable data and help me have a positive result in the subjects’ development. 
	* Questionnaires 	
 	The questionnaire has been conducted to reach two aims. First of all, it focuses on collecting the students’ viewpoints or attitudes toward fairy tales. And the other emphasis is on surveying the effectiveness of using writing techniques with fairy tales that students can get in the classroom. 
	* Interviews
Through the questionnaire, I have carried out some interviews to find out the reasons for students’ choices. In order to obtain students’ opinion concerning the use of story, then students were interviewed later to express their ideas or reasons for their choices 
	*Tests
	Test items are the main tools used for data collection as primary sources to measure how students develop their writing skills. The tools are used to elicit the data involve one pre-test and two post-tests. 
PART II
DEVELOPMENT
1. Theoretical basis
Overviews of writing and teaching writing 
Writing and teaching writing
Writing is a complex process with a lot of requirements of grammatical features, the sounds, syllables or words of language, capitalization, spelling and punctuation, word form and function, etc. 
Writing is often revised by writing sentences, paragraphs or longer compositions using recently learned grammar. Thus, it takes writers much time and effort to practice writing skills.
According to Nunan (1989: 36),
[W]riting is an extremely complex cognitive activity in which the writer is required to demonstrate control of variables simultaneously. At the sentence level, these include control of contents, formats, sentence structures, vocabulary, spelling and letter formation. Beyond the sentence, the writer must be able to structure and integrate information into cohesive and coherent paragraphs and texts.
Besides, writing requires writers to commit words or ideas and to convent ideas, think about how to express them, and organize them into statements and paragraphs. The writers have to generate ideas, organize, draft, edit, read, re-read to produce a product, a paragraph, an essay or a report and writers try to express their ideas, feelings to impress their readers in certain ways.
1.1.2. The purposes for teaching writing
 According to Foong (1999: 3-5), there are three purposes to teach writing. 
The first is “writing for language practice”. Writing can be taught primarily for practicing language forms to develop accuracy and correctness. Practicing can do via the imitation. That is using models of content or form as a stimulus for writing. This is applied to language learning in which accurate use of the language was learned through reinforcement, constant practice and imitation. In such language-based writing tasks, students will be given writing exercises that will reinforce language structures that they have learned through the manipulation of grammatical patterns. 
The second is “writing for communication”. With the emphasis of communicative competence as a goal in language learning (Widdowson, 1978; Brumfit and Johnson, 1979), teaching of writing begins to shift its emphasis on accuracy and patterns to the ability to understand and convey information content. Everything such as ideas, opinions, thoughts or anything else, what a writer need to express without being used through spoken form, can be shown in written texts to inform to readers. Obviously, these written texts, at that time, should be considered as a means of communication between a writer and his/ her audiences. The communicative writing tasks, which require greater awareness of writer's purpose, audience, and the context of writing, would stimulate real life situations where a writer would write to convey some information to a reader. 
The last is “writing as a discovery and cognitive process”. Writing is viewed as an expressive mode through which writers use writing as a means to explore and discover meaning for themselves and develop their own voice
In order to enhance their imagination ability and creativity, students or writers should be encouraged to generate their own ideas by writing freely. Free writing is able to develop fluency and the writer's creation. The role of the teacher is a facilitator whose task is to promote a supportive learning environment. This environment provides learners with opportunities to write about their own ideas and discover their voices rather than act as a judge whose task is to identify students' errors. 
1.1.3. Approach in teaching English writing
Normally, a writing process is taught in three stages with different activities which are classified as follows:
Stages
 Activities
Pre-writing
Reading (extensively) a passage
Skimming or scanning a passage
Brainstorming
Discussing a topic or questions
While- writing
Controlled writing:
Gap-filling sentences/paragraphs
Sequencing jumbled words
Transformation writing
Completing sentences
Parallel sentences
Guided writing:
Questions & answers
Writing based on cued words
Writing based on provided information
Free writing:
Writing about pictures
Writing in response to a situation
Writing with background knowledge
Post-writing
Feedback & correction
Revising
Editing
Evaluating
T
Overviews of fairy tales
Definition of fairy tales
 There are a lot of different definitions of fairy tales 
Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines “a fairy tale as a story (as for children) involving fantastic forces and beings (as fairies, wizards, and goblins) – called also fairy story; a story in which improbable events lead to a happy ending” 
According to Kinsella, 
[A] fairy tale is one type of story under the heading of "folk tales." There are many types of folktales: a tall tale, a cumulative tale, an animal story. Sometimes, people use the term folktale and fairy tale to mean the same thing. A fairy tale is a folktale, but a folktale is not always a fairytale. Fairy tales often have some sort of royalty involved in the story (including the fairy realm); the main character (s) goes on a journey where he/she is tested; they have some sort of magical help along the way; good triumphs over evil; there is a transformation or reward at the end. They usually start with "a long time ago, in a place far away" and end "happily ever after." 
1.2.2. The elements of fairy tales
To understand a fairy tale, students need to analyze or clear these elements:
1) Plot: The plot is a writer’s arrangement of events that will express his attitude toward the human condition. 
2) Setting: The time, place and the origin of main characters of a fairy tale are very clear. Without them the story would be vagueness.
3) Characterization: How the writer reveals what will relate to the characters to the reader.
4) Theme: It contains an idea of the story. The theme is something that can be derived from the story, like moral.
5) Point of View: The narrative technique that the writer uses to tell the story. In other words, who is telling the story?	
1.2.3. The advantages of fairy tales
Fairy tales are stories related to children’s childhood memories. These stories captivate the imagination of young minds and enhance their creativity and reasoning skills. Thus they are not only useful in the classroom but also in real life. Students might not explicitly comprehend the issues involved, but will absorb the lesson deep in the subconscious and find the joys while learning with fairy tales due to these following benefits:
“Fairy tales are enjoyable but meaningful” (Hanlon, 1999). They signify human experience, values, and history; hence they can provide both entertainment and opportunities for further discussion. They set as an excellent example of the multifaceted mixture of history and fantasy. Moreover, they can be analyzed in short essays as well as in some more complicated research. Because of their universal values, similar plots and values, most people find it easy to remember fairy tales. 
Fairy tales are short enough. This advantage has added more opportunities to use fairy tales in language classroom since teachers do not have to be afraid of adjusting most of their lesson plans when using fairy tales. Alternatively, teachers can assign their students to read them at home before further discussion in the next meeting
Fairy tales are rich in terms of language yet less grammatically complex and syntactically speaking than many other forms of literature. Their simplicity has made fairy tales consistent in style and form.
1.2.4. The role of fairy tales in teaching and learning English
 Fairy tales usually consist of a great source of vocabulary, grammar structures and syntax. And in addition to that fairy tales contain interesting topics to keep students interested long enough to the lessons.
Fairy tales help children notice language areas such as past tenses, adjectives, comparatives and etc. Teachers could use passages from the fairy tale to point out grammatical features. For example, to ask students to find irregular verbs, to write down all adjectives or to locate the words and phrases that indicates position in place or time. Texts with continuous meanings are more authentic than the connected sentences which are often used as examples in grammar books. Story books often contain extended examples of dialogue that use a wide variety of punctuation marks, in more natural context than is possible in grammar exercise books. Word-order can be taught through reading fairy tales as well. 
1.2.5. The role of fairy tales to writing process
Writing is not the only important thing that comes out of teaching fairy tales. Fairy tales teach students analytical skills. Stories often have familiar structure and plot can create a supportive context for learning about the writing process, building students' background knowledge. In the lessons, students will explore the concepts of beginning, middle, and ending by reading a variety of stories and charting the events on storyboards. As they retell the stories, students are encouraged to make use of sequencing words (first, so, then, next, after that, finally). Starting with prewriting questions and a storyboard, students construct original stories, progressing from shared writing to guided writing; independent writing is also encouraged.	
Stories give students insights and help them write in second language in a more imaginative way. Students become more creative by comparing their own point of view with that/ those of the main character(s) of the story. Whenever students read, they interact with the text. By interacting with the text, they interpret what they read. By interpreting what they read, they can work toward writing English more creatively. 
2. The existing state of problems before using fairy tales in teaching writing skills
Students’ condition and factors cause difficulties in teaching and learning writing
2.1.1.Students’ condition
	Most of the Kien Tho Secondary School students, who are the subjects in this study are in grade 8, come from mountainous area. They do not have good conditions in order to join extra lessons. Especially, they almost do not care much about study English. In addition, students hardly have much time to practice writing in class. The biggest difficulty most of the students meet is poorly combining the knowledge of grammar, word forms, etc, to write up sentences or a passage, a paragraph. Above all, most of them are not interested in learning writing because of lots of synthetic requirements of vocabulary, grammar, imagination, etc in writing skills. 
2.1.2. Factors 
 There are so many factors cause difficulties for learners in writing such as the inadequacy of vocabulary, grammar rules, the weakness in generating ideas, etc. Besides, students’ first language affects learning the target language as one of the other important factors. This is why students make certain mistakes and repeat them. In general, there some factors cause difficulties in writing as follows: 
a. The teaching method and the environment are the main causes of students’ weaknesses in English. In fact, teachers’ weak qualification in English has a great influence in students’ results. An inappropriate method will lose learners’ motivation and interest in the lesson. 
b. The limitation of vocabulary. Vocabulary plays an important role in generating writers’ ideas. Without words, writers hardly express their thoughts in mind, but they normally repeat the same words. This hinders their creativity and makes monotonous writings. Apparently, students couldn’t give voice to their thoughts because of the inadequate stock of vocabulary.
c. English language learners don’t use invented spelling and their written texts	are restricted to words which they know.
d. The inflexibility in using tenses. Most of the learners, especially, those who have elementary level, tend to use the present tense in their writing.
e. The illness of grammar rules. Writing skills obviously require a qualified knowledge of grammar such as spelling, punctuation, the combination of tenses, cohesion, cohesive, etc.
f. Students do not realize their own mistakes because of not getting suitable feedback from their partners or teachers. 
The result of a survey before teaching writing skills with fairy tales
To measure students’ proficiency in learning wri