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Learning Through Stories

By: Bishara Adam

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Learning Through Stories

Stories offer a whole imaginary world which is created by language.

You need knowledge about stories to be able to bring this world into the classroom.

Use of stories and contexts in home country or culture can help YLs connect English with their background knowledge, which is limited because of their young age and inexperience.

Take a favourite story in the L1 and translate it into English

Allow students a chance to personalize content every lesson.

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Stories & Themes as a Holistic Approaches to Teaching & Learning

Stories facilitate teacher to bring children to their imaginary world, language that is created based on the level of difficulties.

Meanwhile theme can be started from an main topic that then branched out in many different directions so that children can pursue their personal interest through foreign language.

Stories can make the world be brought into the classroom.

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Stories & Themes as a Holistic Approaches to Teaching & Learning

Teacher decides the content that accessible to learners and to construct activities that offer language learning opportunities.

Skills and language knowledge of a text book writers are needed.

Stories are frequently claimed to bring many benefits to young learners classrooms, including language development.

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The Discourse Organization of Stories

Events happen in different points in time.

Their thematic structure changes over the timescale.

Prototypical Features of StoriesAn opening

Introduction of Characters

Description of the Setting

Introduction of a problem

A series of events that leads to:

The resolution of the problem

The closing

A moral

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Language Use in StoriesParallelism (pattern of predictability + surprise, or repetition + change)

Rich vocabulary

Alliteration (words that have same initial consonant)

Contrast (in character, action, setting)

Metaphor

Intertextuality (making reference within one text to aspects of other texts that have become part of shares cultural knowledge)

Narrative / dialogue (text concern the series of events/dialog=use of language as it would be spoken by the characters)

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Quality in Stories

A good story:

Have characters and a plot that engage

Have artwork that helps telling the story

Have a satisfying closure

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Choosing Stories to PromoteLanguage Learning

‘Real’ books or specially written ones?

Will the content engage the learners?

Are the values and the attitudes embodied in the story acceptable?

How is the discourse organized?

What is the balance of dialogue and narrative?

How is language used?

What new language is used?

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Ways of Using a Story

Evaluating the language learning opportunities of the story

Language learning tasks using the story

Preparation activity

Core Activity

Follow-up Activity

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Developing Tasks Around a Story

Listening Skills

Discourse Skills

Focused Reading Skills Practice

Writing Skills

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Listening Skills

Read or tell simple stories to the students. You can use pictures or small objects.

After initial storytelling, ask the learners tell the story. This technique is the most effective if it involve several students.

Choose one person to re-tell the story, then ask others to continue the story.

Let all the students tell the story unless it is finished. In short, let each student tell two or three sentences of the story.

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Discourse Skills

Storytelling with objects.

Use objects such as toys, forks, cups to start the stories.

For example, divide the students in the groups of three to five and distribute four to five objects to each group.

Ask each of the group to make a story that includes all of their objects.

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Discourse Skills

Storytelling with pictures.

Use pictures in the same way as objects were used in the previous activity.

Distribute four to five pictures to each group.

Make sure each student has one picture.

Ask each group to make up a story that includes all the pictures.

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Focused Reading Skills Practice

Read or tell simple stories to the students. You can use pictures or small objects.

After initial storytelling, ask the learners tell the story. This technique is the most effective if it involve several students.

Choose one person to re-tell the story, then ask others to continue the story.

Let all the students tell the story unless it is finished. In short, let each student tell two or three sentences of the story.

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Writing Skills

Have the learners draw or paint a scene from a story and then write at least one line from the story under the picture.

Use the variation of the speaking activities above (storytelling with objects or storytelling with pictures).

After the learners create the story, have the group dictate it as one person writes it down.

Have the students write individual stories, using objects or pictures. Then they can compare their stories within small groups.