STORIES: Teaching Tools

STORIES AS TEACHING TOOLS

*Stories are the world’s oldest technique for teaching and memorizing, and they still retain their magic. They are how we read the world. We tell our life “story”. We gossip – another form of storytelling. We watch films, soap operas and the news, read novels, short stories and comics. Why? To experience a story.

*Stories exercise the imagination. When we hear or read a story, we co-create it in the mind. It becomes a little film playing inside our heads. If we’re lucky, we may feel as if we’re living two lives.

*Stories involve emotions like fear, sadness, and joy. These engage us and help us to empathize as we inhabit the lives of others.

*Stories are usually chronological. They contain a beginning, a middle (or sometimes a muddle) and an ending. This structure helps to guide students as they follow the sequence of events.

*Stories use formulas that translate across cultures. In all languages, stories contain conflict and a hero who braves obstacles to find his/her salvation. Stories also use linguistic formulas: “once upon a time” … “and they all lived happily ever after”.

*Stories contain rich vocabulary: adjectives to describe wizards and witches, powerful verbs to invoke battles and bust-ups, and vivid descriptions of mountaintop castles or crepuscular caves.

*Children’s stories often use the three Rs: repetition, rhyme andrhythm in lines such as “fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman”; “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”; “What big eyes you have! What big ears you have!” These lines are like ritualistic incantations, and they reinforce language.

*Stories contain language play. Fairy tales and folk stories often contain playful words, puns, and riddles. They also include names that invite readers to enjoy language for its own sake: Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Tom Thumb. For Charles Dickens fans: Ebeneezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist, Pecksniff, Fagin, Magwich.

*Stories are multi-purpose: in language-learning terms, they can involve all four skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening); can be long or short, funny or sad; and can use an inexhaustible range of grammar and vocabulary.

*Stories express cultural beliefs and values. In religious texts, stories such as the parables in the Bible are a vehicle for moral guidance. But non-religious texts often contain a moral, too. In fairy tales, the good live happily and the bad die horribly. In noir fiction, everybody loses, even the winners. And in all fiction, the hero teaches us how to behave when the walls are caving in and the vultures gathering.

APPROACHES TO STORYTELLING IN CLASS

After considering the above, I thought about all the approaches to storytelling that I’ve used in class or heard about over the years. They come under three categories:

(1) Students read a story or listen to a recording or watch a film clip.

(2) Teacher tells a story. Students listen.

(3) Students tell a story. Everyone listens.

Within those categories there are many variations. In recent years, the options for (3) have widened. Digital storytelling may involve animation and story-boarding software, or it may combine audio, video and graphics. The icing on the cake might be to publish stories digitally.

Many classes benefit from the idea that, like dance and music, storytelling is a performance art. It comes to life in front of an audience. The current trend is to focus on students telling anecdotes about their lives, because these are personally meaningful to them, but there are numerous types of story – film or book plots, biography, and folk tales, to name a few, all of which can be used in class.

            SCAFFOLDING A STORY

How do you make a complex story easier for students who have a very low level of English? Here are some ideas:

*Use bilingual storytelling. This only works if your students all speak the same L1 and if you speak it, too. You code-switch while telling the story. For example, if your students are Spanish speakers: “one day there was a rabbit, un conejo, who lived in a campo, a field. The rabbit had fifteen brothers, quince hermanos, and ten sisters, diez hermanas.”

*Use pictures to support the story. Students are given several pictures, Before listening, they try to put them in order and guess the story.  I saw this done with photos illustrating the life of Nelson Mandela. The act of manipulating pictures motivated the students to listen carefully.

*Use key words from the story. As with pictures, these act as advance organizers for the students, who predict what happens in the story.

*Use TPR (Total Physical Response). The students act out the story. For younger learners, simple repetitive gestures can be effective. I saw one teacher recount a fictional tale of an epic kayak journey. Whenever the hero was in the kayak, the students did a rowing movement. They loved it and it kept them involved throughout.

*Use jigsaw stories. The students read or listen to only a part of the story. Their partner has the other part. They come together to piece together the whole story.

*Use the teacher’s voice. The voice is the storyteller’s most valuable tool. Through it, the teacher controls volume, emphasis, pace, vocabulary and grammar, length of utterances and length of story.

Taken from https://blog.reallyenglish.com/2015/12/03/storytelling-in-elt/

Theory and storytelling

Storytelling by Eric Miller.

“Storytelling” can be defined as, relating a series of events. Storytelling can be considered as a type of play.

A distinction can be made between actual storytelling, and presenting a story through other mediums. The difference is that in actual storytelling, the tellers and listeners can give instantaneous and ongoing feedback to each other. Even though making movies (or other recordings, or books) is not actual storytelling, we often speak of cinematic storytellers. To be most verbally accurate, we might say that movie makers (and novelists, etc) are presenting a story.

Projection, Identification, Empathy, Imitation, and Imagination are important processes when it comes to people and stories. People project themselves into story characters. They identify with the characters. They feel empathy with the characters. This occurs through the use of the listener’s imagination. The listener may then imitate the character. Each culture has traditional and conventional ways of signaling that a story is beginning and ending. In English, one way is -- “Once upon a time”, and “They lived happily ever after”. Some storytellers like to comment upon, and tell the moral of, a story. Others like to let the story speak for itself, and permit listeners to generate their own interpretations and meanings.

 Storytellers often alternate between

• narrating a story, and going into character (role-playing, speaking dialogue).

 • speaking and singing.

 • normal conversational speech and movement; and stylized (exaggerated, rhythmical, etc) speech and movement

 • telling in the past tense, and in the present tense.

What Makes a Storytelling Event Great, Entertaining, and Meaningful?

Listeners are drawn in, and feel involved and engaged. They relate to the teller and to what is being told. They forget themselves, and get involved in the efforts, struggles, and behavioural styles of the characters. They put themselves in the place of the characters; they relate to characters’ situations and decisions, on the levels of feeling (emotion) and intellect (thought). The story is important to both teller and listeners. The style of telling is vivid and clear -- the design (of the form and content) of the storytelling experience is in step with the times.

http://www.storytellingandvideoconferencing.com/67.pdf

www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/story-telling-language-teachers-oldest-technique

STORY TELLING TECHNIQUES

Some stories for the teacher to choose from

http://www.storyarts.org/lessonplans/lessonideas/#picture

Some history...

The history of storytelling

Stories have been part of our societies since ever. The way of telling stories evolves constantly according to each era. The first stories were in form of cave paintings and evolved into novels, movies and more. Stories have always fascinated humankind! Although the ways of telling stories have changed, the desire of telling and listening to stories still remains intact. Some stories slip past, while others have a great impact on how we look at life.

One of the first ways of storytelling discovered was a series of cave paintings in the Lascaux caves of Pyrenees Mountains in France. This story in form of painting shows animals and a human being and it follows a series of events. The story tells ritual performing and hunting practices.

Around the year 700 B.C, the first printed story, the epic of Gilgamesh, was created and began to spread from Mesopotamia to other parts of Europe and Asia.

Aesop lived in the year 500 B.C. and was well known because of his oral stories. In the 200s B.C, Aesop’s fables were written, this shows how oral storytelling can surpass cultures and eras and still remain in people’s lives. People remembered his stories so well that even 300 years later the stories were revered enough for mass production.

Storytellers became an important part in every community because they had a valuable skill which was the ability to tell stories. As many events were taking place, like wars, the storytellers were in charge of transmitting the stories so people could remember them. We cannot confuse telling stories with just stating what happened because stories began to emerge as a way to preserve raw emotions and sequence of the actual event while stating what happened did not convey emotions or feelings.

“The Bible’s Old Testament spoke of men and women, of tales and lessons learned that occurred many, many years before they were written.  A majority of the books relied on solid resources for their writings.  What were these resources?  Stories.  People witnessed events, heard the stories and kept them alive through word of mouth.  They told their friends, families, and communities about the events, and a chain was formed, one link, one storyteller, at a time.”

Shakespeare became a legend when his plays and sonnets were published. He started as a storyteller and he was well-known by his closest, but he became immortalized in his written pieces.

“From a young street rat in London to being taught in every school hundreds of years later, he made his mark on literature forever.  How did he do it?

Storytelling.”

“History is nothing but a series of stories that, when told correctly, can teach us lessons, give us insights into a variety of concepts, or entertain us.  Every story serves a purpose, even if to simply relay a message.  Without history, without chronicled stories, mankind would never learn from his mistakes, would never dream to emulate past heroes, would never see anything but the now.  We would be clueless to the past, and therefore helpless for the future.

We all crave stories because they allow us to sympathize with characters.  Tell your audience a story, and you will gain their support.  You will create a following for your cause and inspire your audience to act and believe.

In your next presentation, remember the power of storytelling.  Remember that even in a straightforward business presentation, a story helps to illustrate a point better than a set of facts.  A story gives people a reason to care about what you’re saying.  They relate to the characters, the plot and the lessons learned.  They relate to your story, and therefore your message.

So, what’s your story?”

(Source: http://bigfishpresentations.com/2012/02/28/a-very-brief-history-of-storytelling/)

Benefits