Dear Editor,
Nowadays, secondary students have to study different electives in the new NSS English Curriculum. Some people criticize that it is a waste of time and students do not benefit much at all. As a student who is taking short stories as one of my electives, I am writing to express my views to the issue.
We learn different genres, structures and characteristics of short stories. We can choose to read modern or classic ones, and we can choose our favourite genres including romance, horror, science fiction and so on. We can learn valuable things from these short stories.
We have been learning English for years, but most of the time we just study things from the textbooks. We keep on doing grammar exercises but we do not even know what they are for. Reading short stories is a great chance for us to test our English level because those short stories are written by people who are really good at English. We can learn vocabulary items, useful phrases and also some special techniques while reading. Do you all still remember how teachers at primary school advised us to do in order to improve our Chinese language? It is reading. So now, the best way for us to improve our English language is to read short stories. It is beneficial to us because we can learn different things.
Moreover, we can learn and entertain ourselves through reading. As mentioned above, there are different genres of short stories. We can choose our favourite ones to read. We do not only get entertainment, but also inspiration. Some stories are so enlightening and touching that they may change our lives. For example, "The Happy Prince", which is a popular short story, is really a masterpiece. I can appreciate the beauty of English language and I change my attitude towards life too. These are some valuable things that we cannot learn from the textbooks or normal study. Reading short stories should be relaxing because it is absolutely different from doing grammar drilling exercises. Short stories are a kind of culture. If we can understand them, we can learn English well.
Some people said that we should put more effort into improving our basic knowledge because most of us got poor results when doing grammar items. But in fact, short stories can teach us more grammar items. In daily life, we seldom use English to communicate with others. So some students just have a smattering of knowledge and concepts and do not know how to apply the knowledge to real life. However, if we read short stories, we can know the usage of different grammar items because there are examples. Through the conversation between characters, the description of the situation and so on, we can learn different grammar items in context and, thus, improve our English proficiency.
All in all, reading short stories can give us opportunities to learn English in a different way. It is a more preferable and effective alternative to help us learn English because it can improve our grammar, vocabulary and writing skills at the same time. Some short stories even teach us a moral lesson. We benefit much from reading them.
Yours faithfully,
Chris
Chris Wong