The power of stories

It's well known to cognitive scientists that stories have a powerful hold, not just on our imaginations, but on our memory. Language teachers and language learning textbooks have long given us examples of stories to amuse, interest, provide input and provoke interaction. I bet some of you remember stories from the text books you used at school. I've noticed in recent years a decline in their use, For example, I was looking through some NCELP resources yesterday, I was struck how absent stories are. I think this is a shame.

When I taught, some of my favourite Y7 and Y8 (beginner) resources from the text books were short cartoon stories. Some of you might recall, from the Tricolore series, the Tom et Jojo  and Louis Laloupe stories. Tom et Jojo were the copyright-free version of Tom and Jerry and they would chase around the house, conveniently doing things featuring regular first group (-er) verbs in the present tense. Louis Laloupe was an incompetent detective who didn't realise that his primary role was to be another vehicle for contextualised grammar.

I'm sure the classes were more interested in their jolly japes than the how the verbs worked - that's entirely normal. Pupils are more interested in meaning than language forms. But for me as a teacher, these little illustrated stories were an absolute gift, since they enabled me to deploy a range of productive activities which provided large amounts of meaningful input and opportunities to practise with it.

One key advantage of stories is that they provide multiple examples of action verbs and sequences of events. This makes it easy to ask questions and elicit answers, allowing pupils to read aloud or manipulate the source text. When stories are presented in a series, pupils become familiar with the characters. Stories can be exploited in somewhat imaginative, but feasible ways ("Imagine you are the detective. Tell the story from your point of view.") As I mentioned, stories can be designed to contextualise grammar, a long-standing practice, so that pupils get to hear and see repeated examples of chunked language. For most pupils, silly stories are more interesting (I would contend) than texts of factual interest.

So how did I go about exploiting these little stories? A typical sequence would go as follows. Please note that this is not rocket science stuff, but new teachers in particular may benefit from what I am describing.

1. Teacher reads the text aloud. Pupils can follow the written text with their fingers.

Choral repetition. The teacher reads aloud one chunk at a time, pupils repeat, either as a whole class, or in rows, or individually. If individual repeat the teacher would choose them carefully. I would consider having a parallel translation available for some classes, so that there can be no doubt about the meaning of the text.

2. Pop-up phonology and phonics. At this stage, any issues of phonology or phonics can be dealt with. This would mean focusing on the tricky sounds or sound-spelling correspondences. (By the way, I find this more satisfying than teaching sound-spelling correspondences in isolation, as is the practice in the NCELP resources I referred to earlier.)

3. Individual reading aloud. This could either be one pupils at a time, each one doing just a sentence of three. Or, if the class is ready, done in pairs - which has the advantage of allowing more pupils to practise. An interesting alternative, is to allow pupils to all read aloud, but with their fingers in their ears.

4. Find the French. Give chunks in English which pupils must find in the text. You have a choice of taking these in the order they appear in the text or not.

5. Correcting false statements. The teacher makes false statements which resemble the content of the original text, but with changes. Effectively, this provides an opportunity to process the meaning a bit more, while doing more reading aloud. Note how the cognitive load is being managed throughout the sequence. True/false statements are an alternative, but they provide no opportunity to produce output.

6. Questions. I would run through the hierarchy of question types. The aim here is to provide more comprehensible listening input and elicit output at various levels of complexity. As a reminder, questions types would look like this;

• Louis Laloupe is a detective, yes or no?   (Yes/no question)
• Is Louis a detective or a doctor?    (Either/or question)
• Is Louis a detective, a doctor or a teacher?  (Multi-choice question)
• Is he searching for Monique? (No, he's searching for...)  (Yes/no question)
• Is he searching for Marc or Monique?  (Either/or)
• Who is he searching for? (Question word question)

Pupils can answer with hands up, no hands up or on mini-whiteboards. You can allow wait time for pupils to rehearse their answers mentally (good for memory building). This style of questioning is sometimes called circling. It has a venerable tradition.

7. Aural gap-fill. With the text still in view, give starts to sentences which the class must finish, either orally or on paper. Try the same without access to the text, if the class is ready.

8. Translate into English. Take chunks from the text and ask for them to be translated. Focus on ones which you think may need more clarity.

9. Oral-written questions. Repeat some of the questions you used earlier, but this time pupils write down their answers. Elicit their responses.

That's just a start. Other options are plentiful, for example various forms of dictation, but I'd advise you to scaffold each activity to any extent necessary at each stage. You need to keep managing the cognitive load so that all activities are easy enough to do. Once you have done this bread-and-butter work, with a lot of focus on receptive activity, then you might be ready to move on to more creative tasks. "Imagine you are Louis"; "Imagine you are Louis' dog". I know some teachers liked to dress up as louis, with hat and pipe - I wasn't one of them, although a bit of gesturing never goes amiss!

So, to return to my main point, a story allows for large amounts of comprehensible input, interaction, output, repetition, recycling and (at some point) a focus on grammatical form. Did you notice that in my sequence, I didn't refer to grammar at all? But the target grammar would come up later, or at a point when pupils asked about it. Much of the vocab used would be high frequency, bound to occur later in other contexts. Your story would have been chosen to include lots of pre-known vocab too.

What I liked about this whole way of doing things is that it was actually quite communicative, with lots of interaction between the teacher and class, and between pupils and comprehensible target language was in use nearly all the time.