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Developing listening skills with storytelling | Gareth Davies

Storytelling in ELT is often seen as the preserve of the young learner teacher. Telling a story with lots of repetition, noises, and action is considered far too childish for teen and adult learners. But stories are in our soul, we grew up with them, remember them fondly and can learn a lot from them, so maybe stories can be part of language lessons for older students.


Why storytelling?

The benefits of grading reading are well documented. Students reading for pleasure at their own level not only improve their reading skill but also their grammar and vocabulary level. But why is so little said about Graded Listening. When we do a listening activity in an English lesson there is always a task to go with it. This listen and answer approach often stresses students, no wonder then that listening is often considered by students to be the ‘hardest’ skill to master. We rarely ask students to just listen for pleasure. We rarely say don’t worry about it; there won’t be a ‘test’ at the end. But could that be beneficial for students? Could it help them to improve their listening skills and their grammar and vocabulary like grading reading does?

Case Study

I’ve been telling stories with students for about three years but at the end of 2018, I spent three months teaching young adults in Japan and decided to do a little experiment.  At least once a week I told them a story. Sometimes I did nothing with it, just told it at the beginning or the end of the lesson and moved on. Sometimes we briefly discussed the story and then moved on. Sometimes I built a lesson around the story. I told the story using actions, pictures and sounds if needed to help with the meaning but still in an adult way. The students enjoyed the stories, and they produced some really excellent work based on them. When I asked them at the end of the course if they could remember the stories, they listed them and took pleasure in retelling them to each other.

Here is some of the feedback that I’ve been receiving from students:

  • ‘Thanks to the storytelling lessons, I got skills for listening, imagination and retelling.’
  • ‘This definitely helped our listening skills…. we could communicate with each other and try to express our thoughts, ideas, and so on.’
  • ‘Those stories let me imagine the view, place, person and a lot of other stuff.’
  • ‘I learnt many expressions, including what I’ve never used to express myself.’
  • ‘It’s motivating to listen eagerly.’
  • Some activities gave me a power of understanding.’

One student even asked me if I could help her to become a storyteller like me!

Activities

The first activity I did after each story was simply to ask students to retell the story to each other. This helped them fill the gaps in each other’s knowledge, developed their understanding of the story, and gave them a chance to ask me questions. Because I had a few artistic students in my class, I encouraged them to draw the story at this stage. Here are three other activities that I will look at in my Webinar.

Newspapers

Ask the students to make a newspaper article for their story. Show them a narrative newspaper story, ask about the features, how the story is told in the newspaper, who is being interviewed etc. Then ask the students to work in small groups to create a newspaper front page based on the story.

Newspaper storytelling activity.

Prequel or Sequel?

Ask them to write a prequel or sequel to the story. Talk about films like Star Wars or Harry Potter. How did the story move on? Then, ask the students to think about the story and how the characters would develop in 5, 10, or 15 years’ time. Put them in small groups and ask them to write their new versions of the story.  

Prequel or Sequel storytelling activity.

Twitter

Get them to write a twitter feed for each of the characters. This is a bit more complicated to set up, but it worked like a charm. First you need to break the story down into factual components. Then, ask them to think how each character would respond to the event and how they would update their twitter feed. Ask them to write the Tweets and then put them in order to create a Twitter version of the story.

Twitter storytelling activity.

The last lesson

In my last lesson with the students, I asked them to tell me a story from Japan. I put the students into groups and gave them time to plan and then asked them to tell me the story. Their renditions were fun, enthusiastic and brought a tear to my eye.

I genuinely believe that listening for pleasure has a place in language learning and storytelling can give students a chance to listen to something that is enjoyable and understandable, and this takes the pressure off listening.

Gareth Davies is a writer, storyteller, teacher, and teacher trainer based in Cardiff. He has been in the ELT industry for 23 years teaching in Portugal, the UK, Spain, and the Czech Republic. Recently he has been teaching and storytelling in Japan. Since 2005, Gareth has worked closely with Oxford University Press, delivering teacher training and developing materials. Gareth is also an examiner for the new Oxford Test of English and Trinity College, London. Outside of teaching, Gareth is an author of fiction, a poet and a storyteller. His first novel “Humans, Being”, will be published by Cinnamon Press in April 2019. He is interested in developing creative writing and story-telling ideas for the classroom.

Visit Gareth’s website: www.gareththestoryteller.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXJwzDHPf_c&list=PLoBS1H1c73WxnzW0msraqC2vCAYbkr7Gd


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Making the ‘Impossible’ Possible – How to get your students writing

Teenagers writing in a classroomWriting – is it a chore?

When I was on a recent short-term teaching assignment in Northern Spain, I decided to ask my students to do some creative writing. I gave them some prompts and asked them to write a story. Far from being a joyous activity, the students rolled their eyes. There was a lot of grumbling and sighing and the finished versions were no more than four or five lines long. They had written stories, but they had not written creatively. Why did my students have such a negative reaction to writing and how could I encourage them to enjoy it?

Students often associate writing with tests. In fact, schools and teachers often see writings as something to be done and assessed, so rather than being treated as an essential 21st-century communication device it is relegated to the role of the examiner.

Why is writing an essential 21st-century communication device?

Take a brief look around. In any town, in any country, you will see people hunched over their phones, tablets or laptops, sending texts, emails or WeChat messages. Writing is in vogue. But it is more than that. It is argued that encouraging students to create in a foreign language helps them to internalise it more effectively. This is because they need to think about how language works and what they know, in order to be able to use the language successfully.

Merril Swain argues that input, being taught the language and being asked to manipulate it in controlled exercises, is useful, but it doesn’t produce the cognitive processing required to internalise the language. Whereas:

Output pushes learners to process language more deeply – with more mental effort… With output, the learner is in control. In speaking or writing, learners can ‘stretch’ their interlanguage[1] to meet communicative goals.

– Swain

[1]Interlanguage is the learner’s current, work in progress version of the language. 

Thus when producing language, whether it be writing or speaking, students are being cognitively challenged which is helping them to internalise the language, and get better at it. Therefore, the work we do on writing in the classroom can be seen as work done on language development, helping students to improve their linguistic ability.

So how do we get our students writing?

One complaint I often hear from students is that they don’t know what to write about. Here are a couple of solutions.

  1. Sit the students in circles of six. Ask students to write the topic they want to write about on the top of an A4 sheet of paper and then pass the paper around in the circle. Each student writes a question on the sheet about the topic at the top. Now each student has the subject they are going to write about and five questions to answer in the text.
  2. If you want the students to all write about the same topic, write the topic on the board and draw two columns. Elicit all the things the students know about the topic and write them in the first column. Then give them time to think of what they would like to know about the topic. Elicit the questions they have thought of and write them in the second column. Now ask the students to do the writing task. The weaker or more cautious ones can rely on the information in the first column the more adventurous ones can try to find answers to the questions in the second column.

Task: You are on a shopping trip to a big city with friends. Write a blog entry about your experience.

Instruction to Students: Decide which city you are visiting write it on top of the piece of paper.

Examples

Paris

  1. Are the shops expensive?
  2. Are there any street markets?
  3. Is there a department store?

London

  1. Are the shops expensive?
  2. Is it crowded?
  3. What is the food like?

Task: Writing a small advert for tourists about your home town.

Prague

What do we know?

  • Traditional markets at certain times of the year.
  • The best time to come is spring.
  • Two castles.

What would we like to know?

  • How much do taxis cost?
  • How do you take a boat trip?
  • Where’s the best place for a view of Prague?
  • How much is it to stay in a hotel?

Task: Storytelling

If you want your students to do some creative writing, you might want to start by asking them to adapt an existing story. For example, you could take the story of Aladdin and ask the students to write a fifty-word summary or to write a 21st-century version or a version that would be more specific to their own country. This allows the students to work within an existing structure, but create their own ideas. An alternative might be to take a song or poem with regular repetitions and ask students to write their own version. Ian Dury’s I Believe is a good song for this kind of activity and can be found in Headway Intermediate.

Call a draft a draft

It is a good idea to encourage students to call their work drafts, to give them a sense that they can, and should, make changes. Asking questions is a really good way of giving feedback. The questions can help create a richer piece.  Some example feedback questions for a piece of creative writing might be: what happened next? why did this happen? how did the people feel? What did the street look like? This shows that the teacher has read the piece with interest and is keen to know more about the story, and was not just looking for mistakes and errors to correct.

In my webinar, I discuss some of these ideas in greater detail and suggest other ways to make the impossible possible and to get your students to enjoy their writing tasks.

watch the recording

For more information on this topic, check out Gareth’s Q&A session, where he answers all of your questions on getting students writing!

 

References

  1. The tasks mentioned are taken from Solutions Pre-Intermediate 2nd Edition.
  2. Swain, M., ‘The output hypothesis and beyond: Mediating acquisition through collaborative dialogue’ in Sociocultural theory and second language acquisition ed. James P. Lantolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 97- 114 p. 99.

 

Gareth Davies is a writer, teacher, teacher trainer, and storyteller. He has been in the ELT industry for 21 years teaching in Portugal, the UK, Spain and the Czech Republic. Since 2005 he has worked closely with Oxford University Press, delivering teacher training and developing materials. Gareth joins us today to preview his webinar ‘Making the Impossible Possible… How to get your students writing’.


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Getting the words off the page: an insight into vocabulary

Ahead of his webinar on 7th and 12th February on the same topic, Gareth Davies looks at how to make vocabulary learning inspring and motivating.

I was sitting on a train late last year and I watched a girl do her English homework. She got out a course book, turned to the back and started memorising a list of words for Unit 4. The word list had a date above it, as did previous word lists, suggesting to me that the girl was revising for a test that was coming on Monday morning. The girl read the words, occasionally writing in a translation or stopping to look one up on her phone. This made me a little sad. Obviously to her, (and her teacher?) vocabulary was just a list of words to be learnt for a test; but vocabulary is so much more than that. It’s a bundle of words to be used and consumed, a tool to help you express yourself and your imagination, the very key to successful communication in a language.

How can we change this perception of vocabulary? How can we make vocabulary learning more inspirational? What tools can we give our students to allow them to learn and grow their vocabulary autonomously and not just trudge through a list of words? How can we make vocabulary feel like a bundle of joy, each word like a Christmas present to be unwrapped and discovered?

We are lucky as English teachers that we have so much more than just a school subject on our hands; we have a tool for creativity. But if we are not careful we can turn English into another subject to be endured by the students. In my webinar ‘Getting the words off the page’ I will look at some answers to the questions posed above and think about some practical ways to teach and review vocabulary so the students actively enjoy learning words.

To find out more about teaching vocabulary, register for Gareth’s webinar on 30th January.


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How do I stop students from using their mother tongue?

Solutions Speaking ChallengeGareth Davies, an experienced teacher and teacher trainer gives his thoughts on the first of our Solutions Speaking Challenges: reducing the use of L1 in class.

In a recent survey on speaking challenges run by Oxford University Press, teachers were asked to vote on their top speaking challenge. The problem that received the most votes was ‘in group or pair speaking activities, my students chat in their mother tongue’.

I am not sure if this is good or bad news, in some ways it is comforting to know that teachers all around the world have similar problems to ones I am facing, but on the other hand I know that speaking is an important part of the learning process and the final exams, so I know my students need as much practise as possible. So how do I get my students to stop using the comfort blanket of their mother tongue and encourage them to speak in English?

Taking away the comfort blanket

My first answer to this question is don’t worry about it. This might sound controversial but in my experience the more you nag teenagers, the less likely they are to do what you ask them to do. There’s an old expression: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. So our job is to explain why it’s a good idea to use English and create the right environment but not to force the students to do it. So I suppose the question could be: how can I create the right environment to encourage my students to stop using the comfort blanket?

If we know what is stopping the students from using English then we might be closer to the answer. I think there are three main reasons why students don’t use English in pair work and group work.

1. They are scared to make mistakes

School culture often makes students scared to make mistakes; it might not be what we are doing in our English lessons but what is going on when they are not being taught languages. That means we need to work hard to overcome their resistance to error rather than highlight every error the students make. Often students are scared that if they make mistakes they will be marked down, so let’s let them know that mistakes are an essential part of the learning process.

To do this we could have ‘quantity not quality’ days where we tell the students they will be marked on how much they say not on how they say it. Also we could have a dice or spinning wheel with typical mistakes written on it. For each speaking activity we spin the wheel and whatever it lands on is the mistakes the teacher listens for and corrects. This shows students they can learn from their mistakes. Finally, as a teacher it is really important to respond to the content of what is being said. So if your student says “I went in Rome”, initially respond to the fact they were in Rome rather than the fact they have their preposition wrong.

2. They don’t have any ideas

An oft heard quote is that students don’t have any ideas, but in the feedback to the survey many teachers said the students were on task but just not using English. So can we use this to our advantage? Could we allow the preparation time to be in the students’ L1? Allow them time to come up with ideas and then translate them. Would this give them the tools to give more than just one- or two-word answers?

Whatever we do, I think for speaking activities to work, preparation time is a necessity not a luxury. I also think it is important to give students a chance to work in pairs to plan what they are going to say before changing pairs and asking them to do the activity. It is often a nice idea to repeat the activity with a new partner, the students will feel the first one was a rehearsal and they feel more relaxed second time around, (maybe even stealing some of their previous partner’s ideas.) Finally, you could give the students opinions; maybe students are too shy to say what they really feel for fear of being ridiculed, so if we tell them they have to argue against X or in favour of Y then they can hide behind the ‘role’ they have been given.

3. They don’t see the point

I often hear teachers say that students don’t see the point. Maybe a reason for this is that if they are in a class of twenty then they realise the teacher can’t listen to all of them at the same time, so they only feel they are learning when the teacher is listening. One thing we could try is to ask the students to record themselves using their phones or other recording devices. They could send us their recordings so we can use something from it in the next lesson and they can keep a record for themselves.

A lot of respondents to the survey said their students don’t listen to each other. This is a common problem, turning speaking into a series of monologues. One way to combat this is to have an activity within an activity. For example, ask your students to answer as a famous person or as another student in the class, or try to get random words into the speaking activity, or to slip in a lie. Their partner has to listen and guess who they are, or guess what the word was or what the lie was, training them to listen.

So throw away your ‘No L1’ signs, stop worrying when L1 pops up, and allow students to have their comfort blanket when they need it. But let them know why you want them to speak English, let them know that you actually welcome mistakes not frown on them, they are part of the process of learning, and encourage students to listen to each other by bringing fun to speaking activities and hopefully you’ll soon have them leaving their comfort blankets behind by themselves.


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Webinar: Changing with the Times: The 21st Century Classroom

Ahead of his webinar on 30th January on the same topic, Gareth Davies asks: How can we as teachers adapt to the changing needs of learners in the 21st Century?

Next time you are on public transport have a look at the range of technology on show. People will be playing computer games, reading from e-books, checking the internet, messaging their friends, listening to music, watching video, or if we are lucky, actually doing some English homework. The world has changed; our students have become digital.

How does this digitalisation of life affect our students when they come into our classrooms? Have their expectations changed or their behaviour patterns? Should we be looking to adapt our methodology to meet the modern challenges of 21st Century teaching?

I am not suggesting that we should completely revolutionise our teaching, it is not realistic to go completely digital; there is not the equipment available for a start. But what I am suggesting is that we can observe our students’ behaviour patterns to see how we can tinker with our methodology to allow the students to get the most out of our teaching.

Let’s take Social Media / texting as an example. Teachers who claim their students don’t even read or write in their own language are wrong. Students might not read long novels or write descriptive prose but they communicate frequently through this medium, making reading and writing an essential part of our syllabus. But students are used to dealing with messages of around 140 characters, so we need to adapt what we do in class so the reading and writing texts don’t seem too daunting for them.

In my webinar I will be looking at this and other examples of students’ digital behaviour to see what we can learn as teachers and how we can harness their new learning styles to bring success to their English learning. Remember: changing with the times does not mean throwing the baby out with the bath water and completely changing our teaching, it just means learning from our students and responding to them to help prepare them for the 21st Century.

To find out more about adapting your teaching to suit 21st Century learners’ needs, register for Gareth’s webinar on 30th January.