Engaging the Disengaged : A Story-telling Activity Which Raises Awareness of How We (Don’t) Listen to Each Other

Karen Geiger, Italy

Add biodata : Karen Geiger has taught English in Germany and Norway and is currently working as an English native speaker teacher in state schools in Cento and in Ferrara in northern Italy . She is also a Cambridge ESOL examiner and works as a language tutor for Italian primary school teachers.
E-mail: karengeiger@libero.it

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Background
Story relay
Discussion and reflection
Story skeleton for The Children of Lir
Bibliography

Background

I am a secondary school language assistant in northern Italy, my official title is ‘conversation teacher’. My job involves giving an insight into English-speaking culture and teaching English solely from an oral perspective(speaking and listening). The Children of Lir is a narrative activity that I have used in many different schools with both motivated and, frankly speaking, disengaged students and it has never failed in making them sit up, listen intently and participate. Even the most disgruntled class enjoys sitting back and listening to a story and they are often surprised by what they have learned about how we listen to each other at the end of the activity.

The Children of Lir is an ancient Irish myth chosen because it is unknown in Italy (probably also outside Ireland). Why does it appeal so much to intermediate secondary school students? Perhaps because it has an ‘exotic’ flavour with its odd-sounding Gaelic names which students enjoy grappling with – Aodh, Fionnuala, Aoife – and its back-in-the-mists-of-time setting which is somehow familiar because it has all the typical ingredients of a fairytale: prince, princess, magic wand and so on.

In their book Once Upon a Time John Morgan and Mario Rinvolucri state Being required to retell a story to someone who has just heard it is a pleasure few of us would willingly repeat: yet this is what we force upon our students. In an adaptation of Friedrike Klippel’s shrinking story technique I do, in fact, ask the students to recount the story I have just told them but it is not a simple regurgitation, they are also required to focus on how we listen to each other and how we can make a story ours.

Story relay

1. The teacher tells the class that they are going to listen to an ancient Irish myth and then elicits words useful for understanding the story: swan, curse, stepmother.
2. The teacher asks two or three volunteer students to leave the classroom and then tells the story to the remaining members of the class. They can take notes if they wish.
3. The teacher then steps back and the students take complete charge of telling the story.
4. The first student is invited into the classroom and his/her classmates relate what they have just heard.
5. The second student comes in and the first student retells what he/she has understood without any help
6. The second student repeats the story to the third student.
7. Then finally, the third student recounts the story unaided to the rest of the class. The whole story ‘relay’ takes about 20 / 25 minutes.
8. Then the teacher steps back into the scene and invites the whole class to compare the original version with the last student’s rendering of the tale.

Discussion and reflection

Invariably, the story ‘shrinks’ and/or has parts which are distorted out of all recognition. The tale has quite a few twists and turns (see sequence and story skeleton) ; my experience has shown that with each retelling further embellishments are added.

Why does this shrinkage or distortion occur? It may be due to the fact that our brains process speech at 500 words per minute but that we think at 1000 to 3000 words per minute ( Kay Lindahl The Sacred Art of Listening): this would explain why it is not so easy for the language learner to stay tuned and listen to the speaker.

I ask the students why they omit or add so much and they usually answer that the story was ‘complicated’ and they could not remember or that they inserted new parts so that they could have ‘something to say’. We look at how an insufficient attention span or simply fatigue can both have an impact on recalling a story but also we observe that we have no problems in making a story ‘ours’, especially if we are hazy about the details there is no compunction about adding fabricated details to enliven the story and so compensate for any lack of knowledge. There is a storyteller in everyone and foreign language learners are no exception: if you do not know the finer details of a story it seems just natural to make them up.

Recounting the story is not seen as a chore but rather as a challenge: it gives the students the opportunity for creative storytelling and they make the story ‘theirs’. The students who listen enjoy pointing out the discrepancies between the original story and their classmates’ fanciful reconstructions. Interestingly, when I do this activity with teachers on teacher-training courses, teachers transform the story more than any other group of learners. This undoubtedly shows teachers’ inventiveness but also perhaps our inability to listen?

To end the activity and to give another perspective on how we listen to others we go from Ireland to China and I show the students the Chinese ideogram for listening which represents its holistic nature. On the left-hand side there are two squares that represent two ears, in the upper right-hand side the squares represent two eyes, below is a line for undivided attention and in the lower right-hand side is the heart. (Kay Lindahl) This symbol shows that listening is more than simply hearing words uttered by the speaker. Often when we listen to others speaking what we hear goes through our own mental filter and the way we hear something may not be what was actually said. Examining the ideogram gives the students further food for thought about how we interact.
Any story which is unknown to the students would work successfully using the shrinking story technique. Young people do, however, seem to have a predilection for myths and fairytales. I remember one particularly apathetic class at an Istituto Tecnico presented me with beautiful posters of the swan children the lesson following The Children of Lir activity. It was very heartening for me as a teacher to see that the story had really stirred their imagination and that it had engaged them so much.

Story skeleton for The Children of Lir

• King Lir and Aoibhe had four children, Fionnuala, Aodh, Fiachra and Conn.
• Poor Aoibhe died, King Lir and the children were very sad.
• Lir married Aoibhe’s sister, Aoife.
• Aoife was jealous of Lir and his children.
• Aoife loved riches and gold, she was selfish.
• Aoife was a nasty, evil woman.
• Aoife cast a spell over the children and changed them into swans.
• King Lir was heartbroken, he stayed beside the lake until he died.
• The children spent 300 years on Lake Derravaragh, 300 years on the Moyle and 300 years on Inis Gloire.
• The sound of a church bell changed the children back into humans again.

Bibliography

Klippel, F., Keep Talking, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Lindahl, K. Practising the Sacred Art of Listening, Wild Goose Publications, 2004.

Morgan, J. and Rinvolucri, M., Once Upon a Time, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.