This section is divided into two parts: (1) results of the statements concerning students’ perception of the content of textbooks and literary works; and (2) students’
opinions in the open-ended questions regarding the difficulty they encountered when reading literary works and what they wanted to obtain most in reading English books.
Table 1 illustrates the results of the 39 students’ perception of the content of textbooks and literary works.
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Table 1: Students’ Responses to the Content of Textbooks and Literary Works
Items
No. of students for each option
(Percentage) Mean
SA A N D SD
1. I think the content of textbooks is very interesting. 2. I have read English literary
works. 4. Reading English literary works
is a good way of learning
5. I think reading English literary works increases my interest in reading English books.
6. I think reading English literary works enables me to better understand western culture.
7. I think reading English literary works can promote my English language competence.
8. I think English literary works are very informative. They make me reflect on something I have never thought of, and develop personal growth.
9. I think English literary works make me discover that English is not as boring as I thought.
The results of Question 1 in Table 1 show that out of the 39 students who participated in this study, none of them strongly agreed to the statement that the content of textbooks was interesting while 16 (41.0%) of them agreed that it was.
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Moreover, 43.6% of them gave a neutral answer while 12.8% didn’t consider the content of textbooks interesting. From this result, it can be implied that not many of the students were very interested in the content of textbooks.
Question 2 investigates students’ experience of reading literary works. The result shows that 97.4% of them had read literary works. Questions 3 to 9 investigate
students’ attitudes towards literary works. In these seven questions, students were asked their perception of literary works in increasing their interests in English, their knowledge of western culture and their reflection on something they had never thought of before. Out of these seven statements, the mean scores of six of them are above 3.5. The high mean scores of Question 3 (3.97), Question 4 (4.33), Question 5 (4.26), Question 6 (4.00), and Question 7 (4.36) manifest that the students regarded literary works a good way to (1) learn English, (2) increase their interest in reading English books, (3) better understand western culture, and (4) promote their English language competence. In addition, the mean score of Question 9 (3.87) is also quite high, showing that literary works helped students discover that English was not so boring. However, what should be mentioned in this section is that in Question 8, when the students were asked if literary works made them reflect on something that they had never thought of before and helped them develop personal growth, many of them (64.1%) held neutral attitude. The mean score of this statement is 3.31, showing that they didn’t agree that literary works helped them make reflection on something they had never thought of or developed personal growth.
The second part of the pre-instructional questionnaire consists of two open-ended questions. In the first question, the students were asked to give the order of what they considered most difficult when reading literary works, and the second one examines what students wanted to obtain most when they read literary works. For both
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questions, the students had to rank their answers and they could also provide their own options. Table 4-2 illustrates the results of the first question.
Table 2: Difficulties Students Encounter When Reading Literary Works
Difficulty encountered
No. of students for each option (Percentage) c. Too many characters, and they
are easily mixed up. Note: 1 has the highest level of difficulty and 5 the least level of difficulty.
Table 2 shows the results of what the students considered most difficult when reading literary works. Of the four difficulties mentioned, more than half (56.4%) of them thought the biggest difficulty they encountered when reading literary works was the vast number of new words. On the other hand, the percentage of the other three difficulties, the content of the story, the number of characters in the story and the length of the story is 10.3% to 12.8% and 10.3% respectively, indicating that these were not very big problems for the students. In addition, 10.3% of them mentioned other difficulties. These difficulties include: (1) the story is boring and not interesting, (2) the printed words are too small, (3) the unknown phrases or sentence patterns make it difficult to understand the story, and (4) after reading the story, it is impossible to understand the meaning at once.
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In the second open-ended question, the students had to rank what they wanted to obtain most when reading literary works. Table 3 shows the results of this question.
Table 3: What Students Want to Attain Most from Reading Literary Works What students want to attain
most from reading literary works
No. of students for each order (Percentage) b. Obtain more grammar
knowledge Note: 1 represents the highest priority and 6 the least priority.
In Table 3, it is shown that what students aspired to obtain most from reading literary works was pleasure reading as 24 (61.5%) out of the 39 students expected to attain enjoyment from reading English novels. Only 10 (25.6%) of them wanted to learn more new words and even fewer students (only 1%) were interested in gaining grammar knowledge. These findings indicate that the students expected to get more pleasure and entertainment from reading English novels than to learn new words or linguistic knowledge. In other words, the students’ goal of reading English novels was for the purpose of enjoyment of a story rather than the acquisition of more language skills. Thus, to maximize the benefits of literature instruction, selecting appropriate literary text is of crucial importance (Mckay, 1982). Given the above results, students’
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interest, ability, need and preferences should also be catered for when selecting the appropriate texts (Brumfit, 1981; Collie & Slater; Connell, 2000; Tseng, 2010).