Short story as a strategy of developing vocabulary: Exploring perceptions and challenges

Abstract

This study entitled Short Story as a Strategy of Developing Vocabulary: Exploring Perceptions and Challenges intended to explore the students’ perceptions towards the use of short story in the development of vocabulary and examine the challenges of using short story while learning English vocabulary at secondary level. I used quantitative research method adopting survey research design to carry out this study. Forty secondary level students of Dhulung Dudhakoshi Rural Municipality of solukhumbu district were selected through random lottery sampling. In this study, questionnaire both open-ended and close-ended was used as research tool. The data collected through Questionnaires were analyzed descriptively and thematically. From the analysis of data and interpretations of the results, it was found that majority of the students agreed with short story enhances vocabulary power of students related to culture, enable learners to speak fluently with vast treasure of words, also helps to learn idioms and phrasal verbs and helps teachers to teach English language effectively and interestingly. Moreover, short story teaching is taken as a tool for developing vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation skill of the students and as vocabulary is backbone for the development of language skills and aspects. Similarly, teaching short story facilitates students and creates funny environment for learning which never makes students feel bore. Similarly, there are some challenges for teaching vocabulary such as some of the students are not interested for using dictionary while reading short story, sometime teachers teach short story without materials, few students feel that reading short story is boring task, and some students are interested on watching movie, listening song instead of reading short story. The study consists of five chapters. The first chapter deals with background of the study, statement of the problems, objectives of the study, research questions, significance of the study, delimitations of the study and the operational definitions of key terms. The second chapter deals with the review of the theoretical and empirical literature, implications of the review for the study and conceptual framework of the study. Likewise, the third chapter deals with the methodology adopted for the study which includes design of the study, population, sample and sampling strategy, research tools, sources of data, data collection procedures and data analysis and interpretation procedure of the collected data. Similarly, the fifth chapter presents the findings based on the analysis and interpretations in policy related, practice related and further research related level.