IM Development for Literary Criticism and Teaching of Literature: Classroom Experience

With the advancement of technology and series of curriculum reform, teachers are challenged to recalibrate their teaching methodology and delivery of instruction. Teachers may adopt ways to improve the quality of instruction everyday. In order to achieve this goal, teachers may opt to use variety of instructional methods and techniques such as developing research-based instructional materials that will aid the current teaching-instruction modality. In this context, this paper aimed to develop an instructional material in Literary Criticism and Teaching of Literature to enhance instruction in these fields. The content of the proposed IM was based from CMO 30 s. 2004 to align with the expected competency based standards for education students specializing English and Literature. There were 100 English majors used as respondents for the need assessment, grouped as follows: 57 freshmen, 33 sophomore and 10 juniors. These respondents noted that "learning is best achieved in the presence of sample output exercises reflected in the handouts (WM 1.29)" and "handouts promote the habit of self-individualized learning (WM 1.38)", lastly, "teaching the theories requires textbooks and references (WM 1.49)". All the responses fall in the interpretation of strongly agree. Three experts in the field evaluated the content validity of the two instructional materials: The Lectures on Discourse and Teaching of Literature. The instructional materials were evaluated on the following criteria: content, organization, effectivity and preference. The Lectures on Discourse was rated 4.30 while the Teaching of Literature was rated 4.28 both with an interpretation of very satisfactory, recommended for utilization if corrections are typographical in nature; then editors can correct them and return it to the writer then re-submit again the IM for further evaluation. Meanwhile, there were four selected stories used as specimen-texts for this study. The first layer of criticism used content thematic approach to identify the content, which discussed the cultural issues of the texts and the second layer used symptomatic reading to examine the deeper meaning. The actual experience of the respondents in doing the literary analysis provided the insight in establishing the chronology and suggested content of the lecture notes. The actual output from the literary analysis served as sample models in the exercises part. Homi Bhabha's (1994) postcolonial framework established the concept of postcolonial symptoms while Francis Johnson's (1975) framework established the framing of the instructional material. At the end of this attempt, this paper hoped that it may open up a series of literary studies to other perspectives and multidisciplinary approaches and develop instructional materials generated from the exercises made by the students to serve as additional reference in appreciating literature and criticism particularly for a student-directed group environment.