STORYTELLING_by Sagrario Salaberri, Juan Jesus Zaro.pdf

Handbooks for the English Classroom

Storytelling

Juan Jesús Zaro and Sagrario Salaberri

MACMILLAN HEINEMANN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

A division of Macmillan Publishers (Oxford) Ltd

Macmillan Oxford, Between Towns Road OX4 3PP

ISBN 0 435 28244 1

Text © Sagrario Salaberri

Design and illustration © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1995

Heinemann is a registered trade mark of Reed Educational and Professional Publishing Limited

International edition first published 1995

transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or

otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Layout by D&J Hunter

Cover illustration by Jacky Rough

Illustrated by Peter Sullivan

While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material in this book, there have been

some cases where the publishers have been unable to contact the owners. We should be grateful to hear

from anyone who recognises their copyright material and who is unacknowledged. We shall be pleased to

make the necessary amendments in future editions of the book.

A Tale with No name is adapted from Cityscape by Francis Thomas (Octopus Children’s Publishing).

The publishers would like to thank Amanda Maris for her translation into English.

Printed and bound in Scotland by Thomson Litho Ltd

95 96 97 98 99 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Text © Sagrario Salaberri Design and illustration © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1995

CONTENTS

Section 1

Introduction

Section 2

The stories and how to use them

Chapter 1

A children’s story

THE TORTOISES’ PICNIC

Chapter 2

The European tradition (1): a well-known tale

THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN

Chapter 3

The European tradition (2): a less well-known tale

THE THREE ENCHANTED ORANGES

Chapter 4

A modern tale

A TALE WITH NO NAME

Chapter 5

A fairy story

THE LIZARD AND THE DAMSEL

Chapter 6

New stories

The learner as storyteller

Section 3

How to select stories and create activities around them

Guidelines for selecting and adapting stories

Glossary of activities

Bibliography

Text © Sagrario Salaberri Design and illustration © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1995

INTRODUCTION

Theoretical background

The use of literature in foreign language teaching has greatly increased over the past

few years. The materials and activities that derive from literary texts are a great aid

to learning in that they appeal to the learners’ imagination, increase motivation and,

above all, create a rich and meaningful context. Among the techniques available to

the teacher, storytelling is one of the most frequently used, especially with beginners

and false beginners. Storytelling is an established part of the curriculum in both

English-speaking countries and many others, and stories are seen as a first-rate

resource in the teaching of the child’s own language.

Recent studies (1) show that while four-year-old children are generally capable of

telling stories in snatches (the type of story in which the child passes randomly from

one event to another, leaving out key facts as understood), six-year-olds can include

the cause and effect relationship between different events. They can even implicitly

recognise three of the main features of storytelling – the location of the action in

space and time, the main plot and the final outcome. As children grow, they become

increasingly able to identify other aspects of storytelling and little by little to produce

them. Their ability to follow and so enjoy stories also increases with age. Sometimes,

children’s desire to tell a story is the best indication of how much they enjoy it.

However, understanding cause and effect is by no means the only reason that

storytelling is useful in linguistic terms. Other reasons for its use are:

The development of listening skills Possibly the most important of these skills is

listening for gist which involves listening for the main idea or plot without

necessarily understanding everything. Other skills such as listening for specific

information can also be developed through stories.

The acquisition of new vocabulary Most of the new language in stories is perfectly

contextualised and it is usually repeated more than once so that the listener has more

than one opportunity to understand the meaning. If additional information is also

given to help learners with the comprehension of the story (as with visual aids for

example), the introduction of new words need not be a huge task. The grammatical

structures included in the story should be seen mainly as formulaic expressions which

do not need grammatical analysis but which can be learnt in an ongoing way

because they appear frequently in stories in appropriate contexts.

The development of the child’s literary competence By that we mean the child’s

ability to understand and enjoy literature which involves a range of strategies and

skills acquired over the child’s life mainly through extensive reading. However,

many of these skills can be developed through specific activities. It can be said

that the use of stories introduces the child not only to stylistic conventions such as

reported speech, metaphor, emphasis, etc, but also to narrative conventions such

as the time–space relationship of events, repetition, ellipsis, etc.

Text © Sagrario Salaberri Design and illustration © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1995

INTRODUCTION

The communicative exchange involved in stories Storytelling is an activity which

requires a certain level of interaction between the storyteller and the audience and

between the individual listeners. The storyteller can obtain the collaboration of the

audience at several points during the story. For example, by asking the listeners to

guess the ending of the story, by getting them to suggest an alternative ending, by

asking for a resumé of the story up to that moment, by getting the audience’s

opinion, etc. Interaction with an adult in a shared context , to use Bakhtin’s term (2) ,

which is familiar to the child is the factor described by Vygotsky (3) as decisive in

linguistic and cultural development. Storytelling fits into this interaction framework

– the adult in this case is the teacher and the shared context is the story.

Motivation If the story is interesting enough and it is told in an appealing way,

children will normally pay attention through to the end. Nowadays, motivation,

and in general anything to do with factors which affect the emotions are

considered crucial in all learning processes.

Stimulation and development of the imagination The interactive nature of the

story, the recreating of scenes and characters and the ideas in the story mean that

few other activities can encourage the child’s creativity and inventiveness in the

way that storytelling can.

Storytelling in foreign language teaching

The teaching of English to children

Storytelling has always been seen as an aid in the teaching of foreign languages,

although this has nearly always been with learners of at least intermediate level and

through translation or text analysis. The recent interest in using storytelling

techniques with lower level learners is for a number of reasons. Apart from the

aforementioned advantages which also apply to language teaching, there are others

which can be highlighted. One of these is the need for classroom activities which are

meaningful to the learners, and which lead to greater learner involvement. There is

clearly a great need to create activities in the foreign language classroom which

most closely reflect the process of natural acquisition of language and we know that

this process basically stems from the need to communicate.

Recent proposals on content based syllabuses have developed out of this need. The

selection of vocabulary, structures and activities in these syllabuses is based on a

certain topic or area of interest to the learners, or there is a strong focus on using all

the opportunities for real communicative interaction in the classroom ( here and now

activities which involve spontaneous use of the foreign language, classroom

language , etc). This need has also led to the inclusion of resources such as games,

stories and task-based activities as a central and not complementary part of the

syllabus. As stated earlier, all this is designed to stimulate the learners’ interest in

communicating in a meaningful way which in turn helps the learner internalise the

language.

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