Benefits of Using Short Fiction to Foster Communicative Strategy Development among Undergraduate English Literature Majors

Abstract

This study explores how undergraduate students of English literature at Sultan Qaboos University transfer a combined set of compensatory and cooperative strategies from controlled and guided language activities to more communicative group discussions of short fiction. The purpose of this research is to find the best possible combination of strategies that will aid students of English literature with Arabic as their first language to improve their communication skills by using short fiction. The data was collected from a randomly selected sample of English literature students enrolled in an oral skills course that is a departmental requirement. The findings reveal that the use of short stories as prompts for group discussions greatly facilitated students' use of communicative strategies that improved their overall oral skills development.