In the last week of 2019, I started listening to a new podcast series being released by my university (https://www.teachertalk.co.uk/). The first episode was an interview with Griselda Beacon on the subject of creativity in the language classroom. One of the things that struck my interest was when she talked about using story to teach language. In China, the emphasis is often on making sure that the class is moving through the syllabus or getting through the often arbitrary list of vocabulary that the students are “supposed” to learn and I felt that any use of story was quite lacking in my classes but it seemed something that would make the class fun for the students. I decided to run a little experiment and see if I would be able to integrate story telling into the class. While definitely not a full-on classroom investigation, I might do one at a later date for my Masters.
I felt that the pre-K and K1 class were too young to participate in the story and the K-2 class syllabus for the week was a rather arbitrary list of words starting with identical letters of the alphabet that wouldn’t work well with a story, or at least not one that I could come up with on short notice. I therefore decided to experiment with my K-3 class.
The topic of the first week for K-3 was “classroom rules.” I included an extra slide in the lesson’s PowerPoint of a girl sitting at a desk. On Monday, after the warm up and singing part of the class, I gave each class a similar introduction, allowing them to name the girl in the story. The first class named her Elsa while the second class named her Anna (I wonder where they are getting these names from). I explained to the class that this was Elsa/Anna’s first day at school and asked them to give her advice on how she should behave in school. Their first advice was for her to read a book but eventually we progressed to listening to the teacher and I elicited the rest of rules that I wanted them to learn which ranged from “be quiet” to “no bullying.” I then led them through role-playing the various rules and at the end of the class they shouted out the rules to Elsa.
Because of the New Year, we only had two lessons the first week. During the second lesson, I told the students that Elsa/Anna was back in school but she was misbehaving so we needed to remind her of the rules. They then took turns selecting a rule to tell Elsa/Anna, prefacing their sentence with “Elsa/Anna,…….”We then transitioned to telling other students in the class what the rules were before finishing off with reminding Elsa/Anna of all the rules. I found that this allowed the students to use the new words in a dialogue, even if it was one-sided instead of just rote drilling the rules. For their reading homework, I wrote a small story about the teacher telling Elsa the rules.
The second week’s topic was sea animals. I again inserted a picture in the PowerPoint, this time of a boy swimming in the sea. On the first day, I steered both classes to name the boy Louis to avoid name confusion between classes. I asked them what Louis was doing and where he was swimming. While the class watched “A sailor went to sea” to get them thinking about what animals they can see in the sea, I spread the lexis flashcards around the classroom. Once the song was over, different students took turns swimming around the classroom and telling “Louis” what they could see. For the class drill, at the end of the lesson, I would show the class a flashcard and they would tell Louis what they could see.
The second day’s class started out in a similar fashion. I reminded them about Louis and where he was doing. The word activity for the day was “musical cards.” I had one student play Louis in the middle of the word circle. The other students, one per flashcard, “swam” around the word circle. When I stopped the music, each student had to tell Louis what they could see. Once they had finished, that group of students sat down and another group did the same activity. For the group drill at the end of the class, the students again all told Louis what they could see.
On the third day, I had a student sit in a chair at one end of the class with the cards set up at the other end. I explained to the rest of the class that Louis had hurt his leg and couldn’t swim. The activity was that the student playing Louis would tell two of the students to get him a certain type of sea animal and the first student to swim over to the cards and find it would be the winner.
On the fourth day, I divided the students into pairs and designated one in each pair as Louis. I told them that Louis now had all the sea animals and as I showed them a flashcard, they needed to ask Louis to give them that animal.
For their reading homework, I wrote a short story about how Louis had found all the sea animals except for one.
While I can’t say with certainty that the student’s learned better with the story telling technique, it seemed to me that the students enjoyed being a part of Louis and Elsa/Anna’s story and that engaging the story characters in a dialogue made the lexis they were learning more interesting than just the usual drilling. While not something that can be used for every topic, it will definitely be a method I will keep in mind to use for future classes. I’m not sure how easily this can be extended to lower level classes as the learner’s English has to be good enough to understand the story context, though if you have a Chinese co-teacher to translate the initial story telling than this problem can be easily mitigated.
Story telling is an incredibly powerful tool in education both for young and old. It allows for easier unique memory hooks to be formed, allowing a person to remember the lesson content by remembering the story. Remembering “Louis” will automatically trigger all the sea animals and content of that lesson, and thus Louis becomes a trigger for all the rest. Similar to techniques for instant recall like a “memory palace”. Instead of relying on the pupil to build such an environment and create pathways to the knowledge via rote learning or repetition you take that task and present the memory palace as a story. The recall of the content is much higher as well, rote learning for instance only allows for around 20% ( on the high side, it can get as low as 5%) and repetition won’t achieve much higher then 40%, unless an incredible amount of time is dedicated to either of those two which will improve retention. Compared to a story like that you’ll be hitting that 40% and higher with only the time dedicated to it that was used now. Knowledge can be further reinforced by providing some more repetition in form of rote learning afterwards, and as that builds on the already existing hooks it actually becomes more efficient there too.
Yes, I can see why kid textbooks often have characters that the kids follow along with through the lessons. I’m going to talk with my colleague (who is more creatively inclined than I) about make a character or two of our own that we can use for our lessons.
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