REFLECTION

On 14th March 2019, all the trainee teachers of English major were involved in the
Storytelling Performance. This performance was actually part of our assignments which carry
25% of the total marks for Children’s Literature assignments. This task would be conducted in
pairs. The students were being asked to perform a storytelling for children which concentrates
on the craft of storytelling. This task requires the students to be creative and come up with
different ideas on how they want to present their story telling. It will be conducted around 8 to
10 minutes only. A total of 69 TESL from four classes was involved in this performance. It was
being moderated by four experienced lecturers who taught this subject which were Dr Suguna,
Dr Punitha, Sir Fazli and Madam Suraya. The performance started around 8:00 am. It was
held at the Sri Tanjung Hall. The students first were given a briefing by Dr Suguna on how the
performance would be conducted. The students then performed their storytelling on the stage.
Those who still waiting for their turns will sit in a group. They were practising among
themselves in order to make sure that they could perform it well on the stage.

I found that storytelling was actually a kind of activity that really interesting to be joined
by everyone. This is because I do have experiences on joining the storytelling competition
before when I’m in standard 5. The story that I chose during that competition was “The
Fisherman and His Wife”, and I’m choosing it again for the performance. This story is about a
wife that asked impossible things from her husband. He caught a magical fish and she asked
him to let her live. She granted him three wishes but because of being so greedy, in the end
they both left with nothing. This story is very interesting. From this experience, I discovered
that this task is actually bringing lot of benefits especially to the trainee teacher like me as
storytelling is a great vehicle for teaching English to the children. It is a good resource to
develop other basic skills in the learner, in a communicative, interactive, and participate way,
making them think and therefore, develop their cognitive skills too. Furthermore, stories
introduce children to the rhythm, sounds, pronunciation and intonation of English.

During the performance, they were few challenges that we had faced. Our group came
with an idea to present a digital storytelling which everything was based on interactive
elements in the laptop and for sure it was different from other groups. The challenge was they
didn’t provide us with LCD so we have to bring it on our own and setup it by ourselves which
actually waste lot of time before the performance started. The second challenges were during
our performance on the stage, they were few things that was not functioning properly, for
examples, the laptop suddenly couldn’t play few of the videos that we had been downloaded
and also the speaker that we brought can’t be connected to the laptop but we managed to
perform it well. These actually affected our performance as the audience can’t hear very well
the videos that we had played in front. Besides of challenges, there were also few issues that
we can see. The first one was some of the groups including us were being cut down while we
were performing on the stage nut it is actually for the benefits of everyone because we believe
it is because there were still few groups still not done their performance so they have to limit
the time for each group. Next is the portable microphone that was provided can’t be used at
all because it was not functioning properly. We felt a little disappointed as we thought of using
it during our performance so that the audience can listen clearly on our storytelling. For the
current trends, we can see that few of the groups had different styles of narrating their
storytelling including us. We use digital storytelling which actually very different and easy to
attract the pupils to watch it. Some of them use a special kit during the performance which
actually different from the normal style of narrating it. Those methods were actually very useful
nowadays as it can attract the pupils to listen on storytelling and in the same time they can
learn new vocabulary as well.

As a conclusion, there are lot of things I’ve learnt from this activity. We create good
memories together and gain lot of experiences from it. I believe that my storytelling skills have
developed vastly after this performance This has been the best performance I’ve taken part
for this year.