Assisting Reluctant Teacher's College Students to Autonomously Appreciate a Novel to Read

Abstract

Abstract This paper is a report of how to make reluctant teachers' col­lege students read in a prose course. These students were not interested in fiction and had never read interpretative fiction in English. The teacher sought to know why the students were reluctant to read, and how to make them read, and discovered that it was because of students' linguistic de­ficiency and their reluctance to read longer texts. The teacher also dis­covered that in spite of their reluctance they were interested in listening to the teachers' explanation about the cultural elements and the analysis of the short stories. Thus, provided with a guideline developed based on cultural and gender elements, students were motivated to autonomously read an assigned Pulitzer-winning novel.