Silence is Golden
Lucia Dian
Yvonne Catharina
“Creativity
and imagination are unique gifts to mankind… It is the environment, which
either supports or represses the opportunity to develop creativity…
For children to reach their inner voice, to
express creativity, imagination and intuition, they must feel completely
supported….”
Speaking and
writing are both productive skills. Thus, they require creativity. Nevertheless,
writing is more difficult than speaking. A few things that make it more difficult
are the need of good structure (which is not so much an issue in speaking) and
the necessity of building an intangible context for the readers to imagine and
then gain an understanding. These may be the reason for language learners, in
general, to get reluctant when assigned to write. It’s not easy to produce
sentences and arrange them into a meaningful organization. That’s why writing
usually requires more preparation: imagining what to write and how to write it.
According to Regina G. Richards (2002), two of the many reasons why students
may be reluctant to write are lack of interest (in a topic) and boredom. As we
have generally experienced, children and young adults can get bored easily.
This happens usually when they are not interested in what is being learned.
Given the fact that writing is the most difficult skill to do, yet very important
to be developed, how do we, as teachers, expect our learners to react when we
ask them to write? It’s only natural that they would freak out. Still, we know
that it’s necessary for them to develop their writing ability as writing
enables them to explore and expand their thinking values – this is significant
in cognitive advancement.
So, the question
now is: how do we encourage young learners – who tend to get bored and lose
interest easily – to get interested in carrying out writing assignments? The
answer lies firmly in the motivation stage. We have to be able to arouse the
learners’ interest and attention. This can be done by recognizing the things
that attract young adults nowadays and making use of them. Generally, modern
children are pretty much preoccupied by television and video games. It’s
probably because basically children, or young adults, have always been fond of
pictures – especially moving and colorful pictures.
So why don’t we effectively make use of them? Here we’re going to show you how
to make use of silent cartoon movies in motivating learners – particularly
young adult learners – to write. Why does it have to be silent? Because we’d like to spare more room for students to be imaginative
and creative. Basically, the purpose is to write a story based on what
learners have seen. So, it’s really a story-telling in a form of writing. Later
on, when there’s still enough time left, the story can be read out loud in
front of the class. This is a chance to make the learners feel proud of their work.
We’ve tried out this technique in our own class and now we’d like to share it
with you.
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Dian, L.,
& Catharina, Y. (2005, March). Silence is golden. Paper
presented at LIA International Conference,
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