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THE ROLE OF STORIES IN LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE.
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When I first started teaching EFL many moons ago, I remember beginning with “This is a book. This is a pen.” Coursebooks still employ the same methodology limiting the language to PRESENT, PRACTICE, PRODUCE and while this is obviously necessary in the very early stages, as long as we spoon-feed the students only allowing them to get bite-sized pieces of language, at what point do we encourage them to stand on their own two feet?
In my opinion, this should be done through stories. When I say ‘stories’, I mean stories that employ natural, native-speaker-like language, not the sort of stilted language that we find in some coursebooks and easy readers. Things like this: ‘This is a tortoise. This is a hare. The tortoise is slow. The hare is fast. They decide to have a race. ‘ etc. This kind of approach takes all the drama and emotion away from the story and limits the language used.
We could begin the story like this: One day a hare met a tortoise who was walking slowly along the road. “You’re so slow,” the hare said to the tortoise. “You can’t run fast like me.” “That might be true,” the tortoise replied. “But I can beat you in a race.” Here we have set the scene and created the drama of: INSULT>BOAST>CHALLENGE, some-thing children experience any day in the playground.
THE IMPORTANCE OF STORY-TELLING IN HUMAN COMMUNICATION Two friends meet in a bar. After greeting each other Ted says to Tom: “I heard you’d changed your job. Is that true?” Tom immediately launches into a long NARRATIVE about why he changed his job etc. I have stressed the word NARRATIVE because so much of our daily conversation consists of telling a story and yet often we don’t ‘allow’ our students to see the PastTense till the second year of study. No wonder we find it such hard work trying to explain about the IRREGULAR VERBS.
Stories allow us to immerse ourselves completely in the language. When I was in Greece, as soon as I had mastered the alphabet and some basic grammar, I spent all my spare time reading. I gradually worked my way up from books for small children to adult books. Within nine months I had reached a reasonable level of understanding and speaking.
ADVANTAGES OF USING STORIES VOCABULARY The vocabulary in stories is all contextualised and relevant. The same words are repeated many times meaning that they can be remembered more easily. Words do not appear in isolation but as part of a word group and therefore words which might be difficult to explain are clearer. For example, in the Gingerbread Man if we say ‘.....and the crafty fox said: Get onto my head.”’, it is easier to understand the word ‘crafty’ because of its association with ‘fox’ and because he tricks the gingerbread man.
GRAMMAR Grammar can be absorbed and used naturally without needing complicated explanations. When the Little Billy-Goat says: “My brother is bigger and fatter than me.” it is obvious that the Comparative form of the adjective is being used. Have you ever struggled to teach the Present Perfect Continuous Tense? When the 3 bears say: “Who’s been sitting in my chair?” It is obviously not NOW because Goldilocks is not there but the evidence shows that someone has been there recently.
CONNECTORS If we have only taught the learners simple sentences, we then have to make a big issue about teaching them connectors such as: and, but, because, so..... If we tell the students a story and then retell it together, these connectors will arise naturally. ‘.... but I’m very hungry,’ said the troll. ......so he went back under the bridge....... etc
PRONUNCIATION/INTONATION/RHYTHM Re-enacting a story gives students a chance to work on pronunciation, intonation and rhythm. Because the story is bowling along at its own speed, the natural cadence of the language is used. Rhymed stories such as The Gruffalo are particularly good for this and the dialogue uses strong intonation. My students acted it out and I was amazed at how well they got the intonation right.
NATURAL DISCOURSE FEATURES There are features of speech which we use regularly but we might not normally present them to our students. When I was at university in the UK, I was introduced to the delights of Camões and Eça de Queiroz but my greatest pleasure on being in Portugal was mastering the use of ´pois´. When I was doing the Gruffalo with my young learners, they kept saying: “Why, didn’t you know?” as a question but when we got the intonation right, they understood it was an exclamation.
SKILLS LISTENING By telling stories to learners, we encourage them to listen to a whole stream of speech and extract meaning from it without worrying about every single word. We can also get them to predict and recap. SPEAKING After they have heard a story, the students can orally reproduce it giving them a chance to speak without having to invent it themselves.
READING When reading a story, learners will have to employ all kinds of reading strategies: reading for gist and for detail, guessing unknown words, inferring, predicting etc. WRITING By re-creating a story learners can reproduce language which has already been presented to them but in a fluent and meaningful way.
INVOLVEMENT Stories encourage the listeners/readers to get involved – we love the hero/heroine, we hate the villain, we enjoy it when the baddie gets his/her comeuppance. Some stories are funny and make us laugh while others are sad and make us cry. However unruly or heterogenous a class may be, we can usually get their attention when reading them a story. I once read my book ‘Freda and Fernando on the River Tagus’ to a group of kids aged 3-12 in Faro library and they were all completely involved.
MIXED ABILITY It can be very hard if we are faced with a group of students of different ages and/or levels. Nowadays it’s quite normal to get English classes in which some of the learners are native-speakers. Stories can provide a good way of dealing with such groups. When re-telling or re-writing a story, they will work at their own level or they can work in groups or pairs.
INDEPENDENCE Whenever I feel that one of my languages is getting a bit rusty, I read a book in that language and I soon find I am thinking in that language, even dreaming in it at night. Reading is an activity we can do alone and a way that we can practise a language without needing anyone else.
CULTURE It is important to introduce learners to the culture behind the language they are learning. Stories can provide an insight into the history, literature, current trends etc but also linguistically, as it is often possible to get a better understanding of words or usage when we can see them in their cultural context. We can see the English tendency to be ultra-polite when the mouse in the Gruffalo says: “It’s terribly kind of you, but no.”
We can introduce the students to classic English and American works such as Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin etc. or tell them stories such as Robin Hood or Johnny Appleseed. For teenage and adult students we can select interesting stories from the newspaper.
WHICH STORIES? It is difficult to be prescriptive about this because adults will often enjoy doing fairy stories. I once taught a class of 6th, 7th and 8th graders in an international school who wanted to write and act out a modern version of Cinderella. I have made a list of some web-sites that offer free resources and divided them into: CHILDREN, PRE-TEENS,TEENAGERS/ADULTS.
HOW SHOULD WE TEACH THE STORIES? Although it is better to choose a story with some familiar words, I am not a great fan of pre-teaching most of the vocabulary in a story. I believe that an important listening and reading strategy is guessing the meaning of words through using visual and linguistic clues. This encourages learners to be independent and confident listeners and readers.
In class I think it is preferable to read the story aloud to the students before they see the written word. They can then read it silently for themselves. It is not a good idea to ask students to read aloud a text they haven’t seen before as they are concentrating on pronunciation and not meaning. Follow-up activities can then consist of re-telling/re-writing, answering questions orally or in writing. Older, more advanced students can write a different ending. Young learners like to act out a dramatised version.
ENCOURAGING EXTENSIVE READING It is important to remember that our passive knowledge of a language is far greater than our productive knowledge and reading is a way of exposing leaners to a wide range of vocabulary. If we introduce stories into the language class, the learners soon gain the confidence to read alone and, if we make books available to them, they will make rapid progress. Before long, they are using language naturally because they just ‘picked it up’.
CLASS LIBRARY If the library has a limited supply of books in the foreign language, the teacher can create a class library. The students can take out a different book each week and then give their opinion on it. Cheap books can be found in charity shops and, if you are visiting the UK, as well as charity shops there are some that sell new books very cheaply and sometimes the British Council sells off books.
