From Literary Discourse to Lecture Note: English Majors Experience in Developing Instructional Material

Abstract

Purpose: Grounded from the selected short stories, this paper attempts to illustrate how the selected stories establish the colonized sensibility and how these sensibilities share implications in a real life situation. The respondent-informants actual experience in evaluating the merit of literature serves as guide in developing a contextualized instructional material. The challenges they encountered in the process posit the need of developing additional resources in Literary Criticism and Teaching of Literature. Methodology: In understanding the meaning of the text, Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial framework reveals the symptoms of hybridity, multiplicity and abrogation and appropriation of language, which deny possibility of essentialism. On the other hand, in developing the content of the proposed lecture note, this study was guided by Ausubel’s Subsumption, Vygotsky’s Scaffold Learning and Dewey’s Constructivist Approach. These theorists argued that an advance organizer is a form of scaffold that supports the teaching and learning process. Lastly, the packaging of the lecture note follows the principles cited by Ruscoe (2006) for the design and organization and Johnson (1975) for the steps and processes. Findings: This study surveyed three groups of respondent-informants from the CBSUA-Sipocot Campus. The first group was composed of 100 English majors used as respondents for the need assessment on the need of developing instructional materials in the two areas. There were 57 freshmen, 33 sophomore and 10 juniors. These respondents determined that “learning is best achieved in the presence of sample output exercises reflected in the handouts” with an interpretation of strongly agree. For clientele satisfaction along the performance of this researcher in conducting the study, the respondents were composed of 10 faculty members and 16 English majors argued that “research result would address client’s need” interpreted outstanding. The third group of respondents evaluated the content validity of the lecture notes. These respondents were composed of the three faculty-experts in the field that validated the content of the two instructional materials. The IM was evaluated on content, organization, effectivity and preference. Both lecture notes received a very satisfactory rating, recommended for utilization. Implication: The study implies that developing an instructional material based from the experiences by the students in the classroom setting provides a contextualized lecture notes – an IM which is friendlier to the students. Moreover, this study proves that teacher’s mentoring is still indispensable because of developing competency of the students in evaluating the merit of literature. At the end of this attempt, this paper hoped that it may open a series of literary studies to other perspectives and thereby develop instructional materials generated from the exercises made by the students to serve as additional reference in appreciating literature and literary criticism particularly for a student-directed group environment. Originality: Finally, available literature in content development of instructional materials through contextualized instruction and process is limited and similar undertakings in this field of study is relatively inadequate.