Storytelling with Children (Second edition)

A. Wright

Oxford University Press 2009, 190 pp., £19.50

isbn 978 0 194 42583 4

There seems to have been a spurt of second editionsof classic titles over the last few years (see Duff andMaley 2007 and Hedge 2005), perhaps to make upfor the lack of new teacher resource books, to keepthem going when so many other classic books aresimply going out of print, or in this case maybe as a bitof nostalgia from Alan Maley as the Oxford ResourceBooks for Teachers and his editorship of it came closeto its end.

Along with Andrew Wright’s other books in the series(Wright 1997, 2001), Storytelling with Childrencertainly is a classic. I was very glad to be prompted bythis update to look at it again because despiteteaching courses based entirely around stories withpreschool kids I felt like I had not picked it up sincethe first edition came out. Andrew Wright works asa storyteller, and this comes through in theenthusiasm and sheer number of ideas in the book.Although his belief in the importance of storytellingfor personal development, etc., can sometimesoverwhelm the importance of language development,I could not find an idea in the book that I did not agreewith or want to try out myself.

Storytelling with Children is divided into four sections:22 pages of ‘How to choose’, ‘Tell and read storiesaloud’; 31 pages of ‘A store of activities for any story’;71 pages of ‘Stories and lesson plans’ (divided into‘Stories using the present tense’ and ‘Stories using alltenses’); and 46 pages of ‘Guidelines’. The changesfrom the first edition are summarized in the Forewordby Alan Maley and are a number of new stories,a revision of the activities, and the Guidelines section.The book starts with a three-page Introduction thatexplains who the book is for and why stories shouldbe used and then two pages on ‘How to use thisbook’. The book ends with ten pages of FurtherReading and an Index organized by Language Pointsand Topics and Cross-curricular Work.

Perhaps because of a large store of books at schooland on my own shelves (buying children’s books issuch a pleasure), the chapter in this book that I usedleast was ‘Stories and lesson plans’. It is well worthreading through this section, however, as the lessonplans illustrate the things that are suggested in theother chapters well and show how the ideas can betied together in a logical whole. Reading it again towrite this review, there are also quite a lot of ideas that

would add a bit of variety to always using books asa prompt in the way I do. One nice example that Iresolved to use next term is ‘Where’s my key?’, inwhich the drawing of a castle, lake, and path involvedin the story ends up as the picture of a key on theboard by the conclusion of the tale. As can beexpected from the author of 1000+ Pictures forTeachers to Copy (Wright 1996), the illustrations arevery cute and fairly simple to draw. There is some helpon how to draw those things yourself, and the moredifficult ones are on photocopiable pages. Otheralternative ways of presenting a story that are wellworth trying include through mime or through thechildren acting it out from the very beginning.

Each story is explained in a page or two, followed bya Lesson Plan divided into Language (for exampleprepositions and ‘I can’), Preparation (often theteacher drawing and learning or practising the story),In Class, Follow Up (often children creating their ownstories), Cross-curricular, and PersonalDevelopment.

The stories are great and the instructions reallyprovide everything you need to try them yourself, butmy doubt is whether teachers who do not feelconfident about their drawing skills, creativity,language level, or storytelling abilities would reallytake the leap and try these stories in class afterreading through this book. Given that this is a newedition and Andrew Wright is such a great speakerand storyteller, Oxford University Press seem to havemissed a great opportunity by not including a DVD

similar to the one in Teaching with Bear (Slattery2008). Personally, after reading the old and neweditions of this book and using stories in class formuch of my career, I still find myself stuck on usingthe crutch of storybooks or similar on the interactivewhiteboard. If I had chosen the wrong activities to tryfirst from this book (something there is not muchadvice given on), for example one that demanded toomuch language or imagination from my studentsbefore they had been ‘warmed up’, there is also thedanger that I would have become even more cautiousabout introducing some of the more unusualideas here.

If you can take the plunge and bring stories into class(even if, like me, just the easier option of alreadyexisting storybooks), you will find hundreds of greatideas in Chapters 2 and 4 of this book. I had problemsworking out the general distinction between ‘A storeof activities for any story’ and ‘Guidelines’ (perhapsreflecting the fact that the latter was added for thepresent edition), but actually the format of the bookworks well as it is quite long and readers might never

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have reached the actual stories if all the tips were atthe front of the book.

Chapter 2 is divided into ‘Activities before the story’,‘Activities during the story’, and ‘Activities after thestory’. There were too many ideas I liked to list here,but they included revealing or feeling objects relatedto the story before you start, getting students to drawbefore hearing the story, jumping up every time theyhear a particular word or kind of word, pinning wordsfrom the story to a clothes line, and retelling the storyby throwing a ball to the next person to speak.

The Guidelines (Chapter 4) are divided into ‘Cross-curricular topics and stories’; ‘Making a storyline’;‘Personal development through stories’; ‘Askingquestions’; ‘Grammar’; ‘Visualizing’; ‘Dramatizingstories’; ‘Making puppets, theatres, masks and sandboxes’; ‘Making stories for children’; and ‘Chorusing,chants and poems’, and ‘Making music’. The sectiontitles give a good idea of the balance in the bookbetween focusing on language and on all the otherthings that children are supposed to develop atschool. I have quite a limited amount of time with mykids and do not have any contact with their otherteachers, but if I could use more of these ideas itwould almost certainly make me a better teacher (andprobably a more well-rounded person!). Ideas I likedthe look of included making a storyline (although thisseems to be drifting more into the territory of AndrewWright’s other book on stories with children, Wright1997), presenting favourite characters from the story,interviewing a character, making a television newsitem about the story, and cutting out words to add toa shadow play.

As the author says in the Introduction, ‘This is a bookfor teachers who believe in the enormous importanceof stories in the daily lives of their children and in theEnglish lesson’. For such teachers, there is a proofhere of that belief and a lifetime of ideas to thinkabout and techniques to experiment with and adapt.The book is written in clear and simple language,beautifully and usefully illustrated, and takes intoaccount the many different kinds of teachers and

classes who might be interested in stories. As theseries editor says in the Foreword, there is also a moreintangible and perhaps more important property ofthe book: ‘[It] is imbued with the human warmth forwhich the author is justly famous’.

This book is most suitable for primary schoolteachers, particularly those who do not have a lot ofaccess to ready-prepared stories or who would like toexperiment with stories presented in totally differentways. For such teachers, this book is very strong onideas on combining stories in English with othersubjects and child development more generally, andso would be great for schools experimenting with thebuzzword du jour (CLIL). It would also be of use tosecondary school teachers, kindergarten teachers(especially those with kids with a higher level ofEnglish), and people who teach primary-aged kids inafter-school classes.

ReferencesDuff, A. and A. Maley. 2007. Literature. (Secondedition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hedge, P. 2005. Writing. (Second edition).Oxford: Oxford University Press.Slattery, M. 2008. Teaching with Bear.Oxford: Oxford University Press.Wright, A. 1996. 1000+ Pictures for Teachers to Copy.Harlow, UK: Longman Ltd.Wright, A. 1997. Creating Stories with Children.Oxford: Oxford University Press.Wright, A. 2001. Arts and Crafts with Children.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The reviewerAlex Case has been a teacher and occasional teachertrainer, manager, ELT writer, and editor in Turkey,Thailand, Spain, Greece, Japan, the United Kingdom,and now Korea. He writes TEFLtastic blog and editsthe TEFL.net reviews pages.Email: alexcase@hotmail.comdoi:10.1093/elt/ccq061

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