From the times of Macaulay’s Minute that introduced English Education in India, English Teaching has been mostly through short stories. Higher educational institutions, even today, has few stories in the syllabus that makes an excellent impact on the Anglo Anemic students from rural background. Mostly the Tamil Medium School Students who enter public Colleges are mostly weak in English Skills. Chikkaiah Naicker College in Erode,Tamil Nadu, India is an affiliated institution with a lot many students from poor working class background and rural essence. Here, for third and fourth semester, the Bharathiar University of Coimbatore has prescribed short stories and the present paper would delve on the impact of the stories on students’ mental and academic psyche.
HYPOTHESIS
It is believed that the prescribed Short Stories has had a terrific impact on the thought process of the students as their receptivity has been astonishing. The short narratives purge lethargies from the minds of the students and make them doubly involved in the sessions. The paper would focus on the select stories and would bring out the factualities and possibilities of using stories as tools in English teaching in India.
EXPERIMENT WITH EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE
Teaching English Language to the Humanities’ class with a strength of fifty plus is a real challenge for an English teacher. Three prescribed Stories are taken as samples,- R.K.Narayan’s Sweet for Angels , Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant are the stories. The class room was divided into ten batches , with each one tasked to work on the real impact of the story on their minds. Different types of readings were practised and critical analyses and linguistic analysis were also experimented . Narration of the story was conducted in spoken and written form. The batches did work with involvement and exhibited traces of language improvement. Apart from psychic impact, the stories stoked the batches to attempt new readings. A comprehensive vocabulary growth too was evident.
Short stories provides platform for rural students to hone their language skills. Psychic blocks plague English development and Short stories are stents that clears the language flow. In short, receptivity is complete with stories and morality becomes a possibility through the short narratives.