Integrating Short Stories in the ESL Classroom for Developing Learners' Communicative Competence.

This paper aims at emphasizing the use of short stories in English language teaching classrooms, for developing students' communicative competence. It also attempts to find out the problems of learning language skills by the tertiary level learners of engineering colleges and offers solutions to overcome those problems. The identified common problems are: learners' lack of interest in their subject, lack of opportunity to speak in the class room and no room for creative writing. In addition to that most students do not have confidence to speak to their peer groups or friends as they come from vernacular medium with less vocabulary stock. Again the existing syllabus given to engineering students for technical English has also widened the gap between students' interest in the subject and their communication skills. Hence this paper attempts to prove that the proper integration of short stories into the syllabus is expected to bridge the abovementioned gap by way of creating interest in their subjects and motivating the learners further and further to acquire all the four skills, i.e., LSRW (Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing), which are necessary for effective communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]