Eliciting students' stories: Student perspectives on anecdote materials

Abstract

This article provides critical student perspectives on a set of instructor‐created materials in which students ultimately delivered a spoken anecdote in a class presentation. The research was conducted qualitatively through the lens of narrative inquiry. Data were gathered from six participants, all undergraduate English majors at a Japanese university. Results found that participants experienced various difficulties related to the materials and task, primarily due to their unfamiliarity with anecdotes and vocal prosody. However, participants reported benefits of these lessons such as perceived second language (L2) development and real‐world relevance. Participants also applied lessons learned from the materials in a variety of contexts including study abroad and job interviews, demonstrating that telling anecdotes about themselves can be a highly authentic task. The findings advise instructors to consider students' backgrounds, introduce anecdote elements, and provide ample feedback and repetition. The article also suggests that material developers should consider student feedback as an essential component when designing classroom materials.

Enhancing learners' self‐efficacy to support L2 motivation: The need for strengths analysis

“…Indeed, nonscholastic psychological strengths analysis is relatively easy to add to the usual analysis of students' needs—we used a single, short‐answer prompt—and easy for the teacher to refer to during instruction as well. In addition, as was true in this study, teachers and students can discuss students' stories that exemplify their strengths in order to practice speaking skills and listening comprehension, and teachers can ask students to write additional details or to tell additional stories when working on composition skills (see Castellano, 2022, for a useful example of the pedagogical value in the use of anecdote materials to elicit students' personal stories as an authentic language learning task).…”