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Storytelling
in Early Language Teaching
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Stories are an effective
tool for early language teaching. They meet the emotional, cognitive and psychological
demands of pre-school children: their need to belong; to act; to share; to feel protected,
etc. Stories and fairy tales are inherently interesting to children. They speak to the
"I" of the child, as Bruno Bettelheim stated in his book, The Uses of
Enchantment.
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However, an analysis of
existing Russian educational materials for teaching English to kindergarten children shows
that stories have been little used. If they are part of the curriculum, they are Russian
translations of English or American stories and fairy tales. E. Garvie's The Story as
Vehicle , presents the view that storytelling can be a major component in an
acquisition-based language teaching approach. She discusses how to select stories,
"unpacking" their language potential, adapting the stories to syllabus needs,
and finding ways to tell them to foster comprehension, involvement and participation. A
related work is The Storytelling Handbook for Primary Teachers (Ellis et al.,)
which discusses the use of "real books," written for native-speaker children
with students of EFL. The books by Hester Stories in the Multilingual Primary Classroom
, and Rosen And None of it Was Nonsense are highly relevant, too.
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In this article I will
give a brief outline of the main points that should be considered when using storytelling
at the elementary level, and share with you some of the ideas generated from my own
teaching experience and observations.
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The scarcity of research
on the use of storytelling in the foreign-language classroom with young children may be
partly explained by the complexity of the problem itself. If we look at the problem as a
whole, the first dimension that comes into the picture is communication.
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Storytelling as communication
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Garvie sees communication
succeeding if both the child and the storyteller are good language users. In her terms, a
good language user possesses an awareness of linguistic, psycholinguistic, discoursal,
communicative, sociolinguistic, strategic, cognitive, and semantic features of the
language.
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Since the young learner is
unlikely to be a good language user, teachers should provide a classroom environment that
will stimulate thought and feeling while cultivating listening and speaking skills.
Stories contribute to establishing that kind of environment.
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We might theorize that
storytelling is experience. This is both life experience and linguistic experience. The
story mirrors the surrounding world and constructs a reality of its own, meeting the
cognitive, psychological and emotional needs of the child. The Russian psychologist
Zaporozhets pointed out that storytelling gives a child a play-like experience. He called
their mental participation "active perception," believing that it enabled the
child to enter the story, identify with its characters, and actively participate in all of
its events.
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The experience that
storytelling offers is not only personal experience, it is a universal experience
encompassing world cultures. Any story offers a cultural experience. Fairy tales are part
of the lore of ordinary folk; modern stories mirror personal and/or national experiences.
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A fresh look in the 1980s
at the interconnection between culture and language has opened up a new dimension for
foreign- language teaching methodology. Language has come to be viewed as a major means to
acquire "cultural literacy," a term popularized by E. D. Hirsh. In early
language teaching, storytelling can be one of the main tools for children to become
culturally literate.
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Like learning a foreign
language, stories create a new image of the world. If we accept the premise that narrative
is a child's main mode of making meaning about the world (Mallan), storytelling can be a
powerful force in language teaching.
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The advantage of a story,
as Garvie sees it, is that it is structured. It follows a course of development that is
predictable.
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Recent work in discourse
analysis has been concerned with the structure of text. Text is viewed as having an outer
and inner structure, the former represented by the sequence of sentences, and the latter
by a sequence of "elementary meanings" (Kopylenko). In a wide sense, the story
grammar comprises not only structure and form, but also meaning units that the
reader/listener draws upon for understanding.
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Storytelling as comprehension
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Personal observation of
classroom routines has given me new appreciation for the role of listening comprehension.
Comprehension can be described as that process which enables the receiver to make meaning
from verbal and non-verbal information. Non-verbal information may include background
knowledge based on past experience or visual information (pictures). To understand how
children comprehend aural text, we must discover what "clues" they pick up in
the flow of speech to form a mental representation of the story. If there is no
construction or rather reconstruction of meaning on the part of the child, the story will
make no sense.
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The point is to teach
children "how to mean" in a foreign language. They can't construct or
reconstruct meaning without prior experience with life and language, and they need
language to cope with this new experience. With storytelling we must teach strategies for
text comprehension.
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Storytelling as a coding-decoding process
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This raises the concept of
storytelling as a coding-decoding process. Comprehension occurs if the text is organized
to enable the listener to decode it in the same way that the speaker-storyteller encoded
the story (Kopylenko). There is a variety of opinions regarding coding and decoding
information. Garvie suggests the idea of identifying main points which she calls
"staging posts" to facilitate comprehension. The idea is wonderful in itself,
but the teacher needs some assistance to know what these "staging posts" are,
since they depend on the child's personal experience with language and life.
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Garvie sees the following
stages of development in a child's ability to comprehend:
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- The learner picks up "clues."
- The learner develops coping skills.
- The learner gets the gist of the message and much of the
supporting detail.
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During the first stage
when the child's linguistic field is limited, s/he should be led to understanding by
"guided comprehension" wherein words and pictures help the child reconstruct
meaning. In this process, each child constructs his/her own story.
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Bieva described how to map
a child's comprehension of the story. She found that at the age of four to five, children
are able to identify 50 percent of the story references when it is told in their mother
tongue. She theorized that comprehension results when meaning units develop apart from
discrete language units like words and phrases. My own observation and teaching experience
backs up this view.
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Nobody questions how
important the selection of stories is for successful storytelling. Our experience has
demonstrated that though fairy tales and folk tales are appealing, they may be inadequate
for teaching foreign languages because of their complicated and sometimes archaic
language. We have been searching through various collections for tales with natural
language and a traditional story grammar or rhetorical structure to make the story
predictable-facilitating comprehension. In our situation, original children's stories were
used, but the grammar was simplified; and the past tense was sometimes changed into
present. I suggest that a suitable story might include chain structures-rhyming words,
repetition, action words, sound words, etc.
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The use of action words is
important in storytelling since they allow children to respond both mentally and
physically. Our observation demonstrated that children's physical involvement facilitates
comprehension, giving the child a unique opportunity to identify with the characters. This
was the case with the story Caps for Sale , a funny story about a man whose caps
are stolen by monkeys when he falls asleep. Children acted like monkeys, imitating the
seller's movements when he threatened them. This story was the most popular with our
children, perhaps because of their full participation in it.
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With young learners,
partial understanding of stories is very often the case. In an action research project,
children listened to the unadapted story The Birthday Soup by E. Minarik. This is a
story about a little bear who is having his birthday party. Although the children grasped
the general plot, they didn't understand why the bear was cooking soup. This is important
because it suggests that understanding a concept like birthday soup requires a different
level of comprehension; and if children are not helped to explore the concept, the whole
story may be wasted. Some previous story orientation is necessary through questions,
games, rhymes, etc. This is especially important if we are aiming at introducing the child
to a new reality through the medium of storytelling.
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These then, are the main
points for using storytelling in early foreign-language teaching.
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- Storytelling should be viewed as an essential part of early
language teaching. It gives a child rich and versatile experience with language and
culture. Through storytelling, children acquire cultural literacy to make their language
learning meaningful.
- The curriculum for early language teaching can be story based.
- Finding the right story is important. Story selection should meet
certain objective and subjective criteria. Objective criteria relate to story grammar;
subjective criteria relate to the child and his/her preferences. When selecting a story
for early language teaching, objective criteria are the most important since they
facilitate comprehension.
- Text adaptation may be necessary to facilitate comprehension. A
story should be adapted in such a way that a child can easily pick up clues or
"staging posts" to construct the meaning.
- Story comprehension and understanding is affected by the
storytelling technique used. We don't know yet which technique is the most effective butit
should lead to "guided comprehension."
- Finally, guided comprehension is a process through which the child
learns strategies for making meaning. The teacher's role is to help the child use
different strategies and to adjust the storytelling process if s/he loses the meaning.
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- Bettelheim, Bruno. 1978. The uses of enchantment. New York: Oxford
University Press.
- Bieva, G. 1984. Factors influencing text comprehension
/child-speech research. Ph.d. dissertation. Institute of Language Studies, Moscow.
- Brumfit C. J., J. Mood and R. Ton (eds.) 1991. Teaching English to
children: From practice to principle. London: Harper and Collins.
- Ellis G. and J. Brewester 1991. The storytelling handbook for
primary teachers. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
- Ermolayev, B. and M. Shaknorovich. 1975. Text comprehension by
children. Paper presented at All-union Symposium on Psycholinguistics and Communication
Theory. Leningrad State University.
- Garvie. E. 1990. Story as vehicle: Teaching English to young
children. Clevedon: Multicultural Matters, Ltd.
- Hester, H. 1983. Stories in the multilingual primary classroom.
London: ILEA.
- Kopylenko, O. 1975. The role of text structure in text
comprehension. Paper presented at All-union Symposium on Psycholinguistics and
Communication Theory. Leningrad State University.
- Mallan, K. 1991. Children as storytellers. PETA.
- Morgan, J. and M. Rinvolucri. 1983. Once upon a time: Using
stories in the language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Rixon, S. 1992. English and other languages for younger children:
Practice and theory in a rapidly changing world. In Language teaching: The international
abstracting journal for language teachers. Cambridge University Press, pp. 73-92.
- Rosen, B. 1980. And none of it was nonsense. London: Mary Glasgow
Publications.
- Stern, H. and A. Weinrib. 1977. Foreign languages for younger
children: Trends and assessment. Language Teaching Abstracts, 10, p.1.
- Widdowson, H. 1978. Teaching languages as communication. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
- Zaporozhets, A. V. 1948. Perception of fairy tales by a preschool
child. Doshkolnoye Vospitanie, 5, pp. 45-48.
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