Pin-hsiang Natalie Wu and Wen-chi Vivian Wu
Dept. of Applied Foreign Languages, Chien-kuo Technology University, Taiwan

One Page Plus, One More Character
In traditional EFL classrooms, where literature is taught with an emphasis on teacher-centered activity, students mainly rely on teachers for text-explanation, theme-exploration, and meaning-interpretation. Therefore, teachers, in traditional classrooms, are considered omnipotent and omniscient. However, students in traditional teacher-centered classrooms tend to not be fully engaged in the learning process. When the instructional design is student-centered, students become fully engaged. They may be deeply impressed upon, and really go into, the context of a text through some well-designed student-centered activities.

This paper reports on an instructional design in which the researchers integrated two activities -- “One Page Plus” and “One More Character” -- in order to develop students’ awareness toward the literary themes of the stories read in class and motivate students to love literature. Proposed by Gillian Lazar (1993) and originally designed as writing activities for the purpose of teaching literary texts, the two activities were employed by the researchers to include both the practice of four skills and peer-learning. With proper guidance from the teacher toward the basic understanding of the stories, students were assigned specific topics for “One Page Plus” and “One More Character” activities. Students took turns expressing their ideas, listening to other members’ opinions, and discussing with their group members. As a final step, they collaboratively wrote down the results of discussions. The teachers read those results from different groups to the whole class so that each group learned from each another. The two student-centered activities provided the students opportunities to develop interpersonal communication skills generated from active engagement and positive interactions among students, are the keys to successful literature learning.

Presenters:
Dr. Pin-hsiang Natalie Wu is an Assistant Professor of Department of Applied Foreign Languages, Chien-kuo Technology University, Changhua City, Taiwan. Her research interests include British and American Literature, and the teaching of Literature.

Dr. Wen-chi Vivian Wu is an Assistant Professor of Department of Applied Foreign Languages, Chien-kuo Technology University, Changhua City, Taiwan. Her research interests include CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) and EFL learning environments