CHILDREN LITERATURE : REFLECTIVE ESSAY

          Storytelling is one of the fun way to teach English to the student. According to a study by Egan (1985), 75.6% kids find storytelling is enjoyable and the rest find that it is not that entertaining. Based on the task where I need to perform a storytelling performance, I gained new experience throughout the presentation of the story. Basically, there are two phases during completing the task which is preparing for the performance and during the performance itself. In this piece of writing, I will reflect on the experiences that I gained.

          First and foremost, on the first phase of the task, during preparation I face few problems. One of the problem is when I need to memorize the storyline and all the dialogues. I keep repeating and trying to memorize but end up only remembering the first few lines of the story. According to Paulston (1976), one of the ways to memorize faster is by recording my voice and listen to it repeatedly. Fortunately, after applying the method, I manage to memorize the story but there are few lines that I could not make during my performance. Anyway, I am proud with myself since it was my first performance.

Secondly, the new thing that I master is the emphasis of tone and intonation to uplift the mood of the story. According to Robin (2006), with the guidance of my friend that used to participate in a storytelling competition, I improve myself by practising the right way to fix my intonation to be more alive. It is quite challenging because my intonation is quite monotonous and it is difficult for me to realign my voice. To improve my intonation, I practise talking by listening to the native speaker voice. Tanenbaum (2011) stated that the method is effective enough to work on somebody’s intonation.

         Other than that, I also manage to improve my voice projection. This factor gave huge impact on my performance if I don’t fix it. Having not so good voice projection will bore the audience and pull your self-confidence away (Gould, 1978). Since I have few weeks to practise on my voice projection, I tried few ways like singing and talking with high note to enhance my voice. Not only that, I also take good food to ensure that my voice sounded splendid on the performance day. According to Guthman (2008), eating the right food can also contribute to a good voice. During the performance day, my voice projection increases a level better than I used to be. Even though I managed to improve my voice projection, I would not stop improving my voice since I think I can improve more than this.

         In conclusion, there are new experiences that helped me to improve myself. Storytelling is a good medium to help students to learn in a fun way and indirectly teaching language to them. Not only that, this activity also helps people to memorize better, uplift the intonation and improve the voice projection. I have no doubt that it was good to have this activity in school.

References

Egan, K. (1985). Teaching as story‐telling: a non‐mechanistic approach to planning

teaching. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 17(4), 397-406.

Gould, S. J. (1978). Sociobiology: the art of storytelling. New Scientist, 80(1129), 530-33.

Guthman, J. (2008). Bringing good food to others: Investigating the subjects of alternative food

practice. Cultural geographies, 15(4), 431-447.

Robin, B. (2006, March). The educational uses of digital storytelling. In Society for Information

Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 709-716). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

Tanenbaum, J. (2011, November). Being in the story: readerly pleasure, acting theory, and

performing a role. In International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (pp. 55-66). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.