Teaching Ambiguity and Critical Thinking through the Short Stories

吳怡萍(Yi-Ping Wu)

《英語教學與文化》 1期 (2005/09) Pp. 84-96

https://doi.org/10.29721/ETC.200509.0011

並列摘要

With the growth of the practical need for English ability in the job market, the curricular objective of language teaching nowadays mostly focuses on training the language learners to correctly produce the target form. This kind of instruction seldom trains students to think critically. Worst of all, when coming to deal with the inexplicitness in literary texts, most of the students who are used to arriving at the ”correct answers” resist and hardly appreciate the ambiguous polysemic nature residing in short stories. In this paper, I propose that the genre of the short story can provide a rich ground for students to develop their critical thinking ability and tolerance of ambiguity of interpretation. During the process of making sense of a text, students are exposed to a special situation and are encouraged to explore and talk about the possible meanings, themes, or issues generated by the text. Eventually, they should be guided by the instructor to arrive at a critical judgment or an interpretation of their own. This paper will discuss the reasons for bringing short stories to the language classroom, especially for developing critical thinking skills, and also gives a brief critical analysis of the textbook models that aim to train readers to think critically through reading short stories.