Storytelling Students: Creating a Virtuous Cycle
David Heathfield, UK
David Heathfield is a freelance storyteller and teacher trainer. He is the author of Storytelling With Our Students: Techniques for Telling Tales from Around the World (DELTA Publishing) and Spontaneous Speaking: Drama Activities for Confidence and Fluency (DELTA Publishing). He is a member of The Creativity Group. www.davidheathfield.co.uk
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Retelling stories told by students in the language classroom
Why students like their teacher to tell stories learnt from other students
Students learning to tell stories they have been told
First steps: a case study
Becoming a storytelling class
Types of stories suitable for student telling
Deep creative engagement
References
There are countless stories available for you to tell in the language classroom. So how do you choose which stories to tell? It makes sense to select stories that engage you and will engage your students. These may well be stories you have previously been been told by students from other classes. Your students will be immediately engaged if you start off a classroom storytelling activity by acknowledging the student who told you the story in the first place: ‘I’d like to tell you a short story that Mami Toyoda from Group 6a told a couple of weeks ago. I think some of you know Mami, don’t you?’
And you might finish off the activity by inviting students to pass on the story, if they liked it, to others, whether they retell it in English or in their mother tongue. Stories are for telling and listening to and then retelling to others and, by encouraging the sharing of students’ stories, the school can evolve as a storytelling community.
When you tell stories sourced from learners like themselves, your students quickly realise that the stories they tell in the classroom are so much more than language practice activities. Their stories may well take on a life of their own beyond the classroom. They may be retold in places they have never heard of and to people they will never meet. Student storytellers are nearly always willing for their stories to be passed on, and this inspires students to tell their stories to the best of their ability. Students’ stories are full of potential life and they soon spread, like wild flowers naturalising on the land, and ‘bring colour to the learning in your classroom in ways that cannot be foreseen’ (Heathfield, D. 2015).
Learning to tell a story is similar to learning to sing a song. As you know, it is far easier to learn a song from a person singing it with you than from published lyrics and sheet music. The English folk singer Martin Carthy says on the BBC Radio 4 programme Mastertapes “If I learn a song from you, and I think I’ve got to learn that song, I know that when I do it, something of you has got to be there, because that’s what moved me to learn it”. When I tell a story I have learned from a student, I imagine that student being there in the room with me. I see them telling the story, hear their voice, even feel their presence. Something of that student’s essence lives on in my retelling of the story.
It is a good idea for students to start by learning to tell a two-minute story. Short folk tales are particularly suitable because, ‘the language is simple yet the meanings are evocative and many-layered’ (Morgan, J. and M. Rinvolcri 1983). The example I give here is the Japanese story of The Poisonous Pears which was recently told by Mami Toyoda in a speaking skills class I was teaching at INTO University of Exeter. I was taken by surprise by the ending of this witty wisdom tale and I clearly remember Mami’s delight when her classmates burst out laughing. I loved the story and I felt that students in other classes would enjoy learning to tell it. So I decided on a mixed level class of mostly Japanese international adult students who, Mami had told me, would be unlikely to know the story.
Because telling a story in English was new to the students in the class, I gave them the chance to use two different modes of creative expression as ways of learning: physical drama and drawing. The whole process outlined here can be viewed on youtube at https://youtu.be/44v16gvbxY8. After doing a creative pre-listening task involving predicting the story, the students listened to me tell The Poisonous Pears. Students in pairs then mimed the simple two-character story in silence, expressing themselves physically and emotionally. Next, I asked them to act out the story again, keeping the physicality they used when miming and spontaneously adding the voices and words of the characters. After this, students sat quietly and were given just three minutes to draw a picture representing the story, knowing that they would not have to show it to anyone else. Next, students talked in pairs about their drawings without showing them to their partners, before putting their drawings away and taking it in turns to tell the story. After that the same pairs discussed how they had remembered the story and, finally, they shared their thoughts as a class. It was interesting that some students felt the miming and acting out of the story helped them remember while others felt the drawing was the most helpful. In both cases the students felt that the non-verbal stages involving mime and drawing gave them time and the mental space to absorb and reflect on the story, so that they could then retell it in their own words. They did not feel that they were imitating the way I had told it to them, but that they were telling their own version of the story.
I then encouraged students to tell the story to others after the class and asked them to be prepared to tell the story again the next time the class met. In the next lesson the students remembered and told The Poisonous Pears again in pairs. Then they were asked to choose, prepare and rehearse any short story they wanted to tell other students in pairs the next time. They were to tell the story in English in their own words without referring to a written text. In the following class the students told their stories twice, each time to a different student. The listening students told the storytelling student what they liked best about the story and the way they told it. In most cases students commented that their second telling was more successful as they grew in confidence. Over the next weeks of the course, each lesson began with a different individual student telling their story in front of the class. Students were encouraged to rehearse by telling it several times outside class both to themselves using a recording device and to others. The listeners then shared their thoughts about the story and gave the storytelling student positive feedback about their storytelling. Over the last few years I have introduced this process of students becoming a storytelling class in most of the courses I have taught. In written end-of-course course reflective feedback, students have universally appreciated the opportunity to tell each other stories. Most comment on the positive effects on pronunciation, fluency and vocabulary learning, and many comment also on the sense of mutual understanding and community brought about through sharing stories with each other:
Latifah ‘It was an amazing idea to learn how to tell stories to many people. That makes us feel confident.’
Thanatchaya ‘I was very excited to listen to other students’ stories.’
Wa’el ‘Telling stories is very beneficial /essential (although at first I didn’t realise).’
Phatthara ‘We can get more understanding of other countries’ cultures.’
Phillip ‘We are inheriting different cultures from all over the world. Not only do stories help us with English, but they also make us wiser.’
Alkatab ‘Storytelling breaks down barriers. We’re like brothers and sisters.’
This article has focussed mainly on telling folk tales. It is important to emphasise that this process is effective whatever kind of oral stories students tell, whether they are fables, legends, myths, jokes or whether they are personal to students such as anecdotes, autobiographical stories or stories about people they know or stories students themselves have created. All these types of stories are more suitable for storytelling than authored stories which are more suited to being read aloud. There is a place for student storytelling on every type of language course and at all levels. ‘Even elementary students are able to tell a story without written prompts, as long as the teacher manages to establish a safe environment and a supportive atmosphere’ (Heathfield, D. 2014). Of course if we teachers are planning to retell personal stories that students have told us, we need to make this clear to our students and check they are glad for us to do so.
Students become engrossed in each other’s stories and such close peer listening leads to a remarkable increase in speaker confidence. With little encouragement, students are often motivated to prepare and rehearse outside class in order to achieve the most successful storytelling they are capable of. Once they have a taste for it, students generally want to carry on developing as storytellers leading to a virtuous cycle of storytelling. In this way the classroom becomes a place of deep creative engagement. Storytelling bridges difference and builds communities, so it is worth putting this most ancient way of teaching and learning back at the heart of what we do.
Heathfield, D. (2014) Storytelling with our Students, DELTA Publishing
Heathfield, D. (2015) Personal and creative storytelling Chapter 5 in Creativitiy in the Language Classroom, British Council
www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/F004_ELT_Creativity_FINAL_v2%20WEB.pdf
Morgan, J. and M. Rinvolucri, (1983) Once Upon a Time, Cambridge University Press
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology & Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the English Language Improvement for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the English Language Improvement for Adults course at Pilgrims website.
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