Technique in Teaching Narrrative Paragraph

Picture Series Technique

Skill                             : Writing (Narrative Paragraph)

Component                : Vocabulary and Grammar.

Description    

This technique uses the series of picture to elicit a story from the student. In addition, the teacher present the ordered picture series to the student and ask the student to tell about the pictures being presented, each picture will tell about the different events, characters and situation which indirectly guide the student to build a simple story. This technique is expected to increase students’ ability in composing a short narrative paragraph and also to add some new vocabularies.

Aim     : to draw on children’s language resources to tell a story. Develop students’ creativity

Preparation :

1.      Find a story and adapt it where necessary to suit your students

2.      Make the flash cards which divide the story into some parts.

3.      Prepare the possible pre- teach vocabularies that may be used in applying the technique.

Steps

1.      Pre-teach the necessary vocabularies, example, if you use the “Three Little Pig” story, the vocabularies could be wolf, blow, run, straw, wood and bricks. Make sure the students understand about the vocabularies that are given. If the story is in the past form, make sure the student recognize the past form of those vocabularies, the teacher could give “simple past tense” at first.

2.      Explain to the students that you are going to tell them a story, but in this case, you can’t speak because of certain thing (e.g. You have sore throat). You only can use the pictures and mime; therefore, they must try and guess what you are trying to say. Don’t forget to give them the title of the story.

3.      Show the pictures to the students and elicit some sentences from the students. Use gestures such as nodding, shaking your head to correct them until you have got more or less what you want. Get one or two children to repeat the sentence.

4.      Compose all the student’s opinions and make a full story. Moreover, read the story for your students.

Advantages                : the advantage of this technique can be formulated as follow:

1.      The students easily compose the story because there are pictures that will guide them step by step to make a full story.

2.      The students will feel relax in composing the story as they feel that they are playing with the cards (pictures).

3.      They are not being forced to build a story and their confidence is gradually increased.

4.      There is habit formation in this technique ( building knowledge, modeling, construction and self-construction)

Disadvantages            : as nothing perfect in the world, so does the technique. This technique has its own weaknesses namely:   

1.      Students which have lack of vocabulary will find difficulty to compose the story

2.      The teacher will difficult to consider the time to show each picture, it depend on the students’ ability.

3.      The class will be noise if the teacher can’t manage the class well.