2018-2019 Faculty Research Grants
Sonia Badenas (International Languages)
The use of short stories in Intermediate French Textbooks in the USA
The use of short stories in second language education has proven to be beneficial for stimulating the development of students’ written and oral skills. As Collie and Slater (1987:196) state, “They [short stories] are less daunting for a foreign reader to tackle or to reread on his own, are more suitable when set as home tasks. Students get that feeling of achievement at having come to the end of a whole work much sooner." In my dissertation, I verified through quantitative and qualitative analysis that students who were exposed to short stories in the Intermediate French classroom got better results in the written expression portion of their final exams than those who had not been exposed to reading/using short stories. Building on my doctoral dissertation, this research intends to evaluate the inclusion of short stories in 10 of the most current Intermediate French higher education textbooks in the United States. The reason is twofold: first because short stories and poems are the only literary genre that can be included in their entirety in a textbook and second because language teachers usually rely on textbooks, either because their institution requests one or for convenience. I intend to further my analysis through a targeted study in terms of format, content, graphics and philosophy.