Using Visual Storyboard in Enhancing Students

7/29/2019 Using Visual Storyboard in Enhancing Students

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Reading Comprehension: Using Visual

Storyboard in Enhancing Students

Understanding toward Short Story Flipping

Fantasy in Lower Secondary Classroom


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1.1 Background Knowledge

In recent years literature in English has become one of the compulsory

components in Kurikulum Bersepadu Sekolah Menengah (KBSM). It has

been included in the English language syllabus as part of the content that

should be learned by students in form one to form five since the year 2001.

In the English language curriculum specifications, the literature component

is specifically put under the language for aesthetic use learning outcome.

The Ministry of Education has explains the reason of putting the literature

component in the syllabus specification as follows:

Language for aesthetic purposes enables learners to enjoy literary texts

at a level suited to their language proficiency and develops in them the

ability to express themselves creatively.

(KBSM English language Curriculum Specifications,

2003)

However, teaching literature has always been a problem for most of

English teachers because literature can be interesting when teacher uses

the right method and techniques to teach, it can be boring when teacher

couldnt find the right techniques to motivate students, especially when it

comes to short story, certain second language learners they have

problem in understanding the plot of story due the reason of limited

vocabulary causing them unable to understand the story completely,

instead of using top down approach they use bottom up approach to read

and understand. Hence, they cant understand the story completely and

they find the story is dry and confusing. So, it leaves us to a question herewhat is the best way to improve students understanding towards short

stories?

Using visual literacy can be a crucial step into helping students to

understand short story better. According to development theory and


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research, children must master visual skills before they can even begin to

develop verbal skills--some theorists even argue that visual skills are a

necessary foundation for later speech and reading skills. A child looks at

the world and is forced to identify objects and make sense of what he or

she sees. In that case, most of the time we learn through visual

stimulation, like what the proverb says picture speaks a thousand words.

Does the picture really speak a thousand words? No but we can

understand better through pictures which we call it visual stimulation;

students can actually understand and remember the plot of the story

better with the help of pictures.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

Understanding a short story can be a difficult task especially for students

with limited vocabulary, it kills their interest when they are taking hours of

time referring to the dictionary just to understand the story. For these

reasons it is essential that ESL students are helped as much as possible

and necessary to understand what they read. However first of all we need

to understand what type of problems student face while reading a short

story.

(i) Unfamiliar Words

A written text may be difficult to understand because it contains many

words that are unknown to the student.

(ii) Lack of background knowledge

Students with unfamiliar background toward the story always find it hard to

understand the story for example the story Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde the

setting of the story is in England, as for students who have limited


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background knowledge toward England might find it hard to understand

the entire story.

When students are facing these types of problems, support

materials such as pictures, photograph, and movies can help to supply

more necessary vocabulary aid and understanding towards the story line.

Through this way it can helps students who are lack of confidence in the

language to regain their interest toward reading because they will realize it

is actually not that difficult as we they think. In that case visual storyboard

can provide more comprehensive way of understanding the text through

visual way and it helps to intrigue students with low proficiency level

toward reading and helps students with higher proficiency to understandbetter.

1.3 Research Objectives

This study aims to investigate and examine whether using visual

storyboard to teach short story in ESL classroom will be able to achieve

better results. It looked into two objectives as follow

(i) To prove that visual storyboard can help to improve students

reading comprehension through the story Flipping Fantasy.

(ii) To show that whether the experimental group students (class that

use visual storyboard to teach short story) can achieve better result

than experimental group of students ( normal class teaching).

(iii) To compare between the effectiveness of visual storyboard to

traditional reading materials.


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1.4 Research Questions

Few questions that will be answered through this research

(i) Can visual storyboard be effective enough to improve students

reading comprehension toward the short story Flipping Fantasy?

(ii) Can normal classroom teaching solely enough to improve students

reading comprehension?

(iii) Can students interests toward reading short stories or literature

improve after the experiment?

(iv) What are students perceptions of the use of a visual storyboard inenhancing their understanding toward the short story?

1.5 Research Hypothesis

H1 : There will be significant improvement of reading comprehension onthe experimental group class compare to the control group class.

H2:

Using Visual Storyboard in Enhancing Students

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