Jason and the Golden Fleece: Can Stories Trigger Language Growth?

Tsapikidou Danae, Greece

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Methodological considerations in teaching English through stories
A cross-curricular classroom project on Jason and the Golden Fleece
Examples of learners at work: writing and talking about Jason and Medea
Pedagogical themes that emerge from this classroom study
References

Methodological considerations in teaching English through stories

Story-telling is a natural part of language teaching. Our students love stories and so do we! We use them frequently to bring variety and creativity into our lessons, sometimes without a particular language focus, but usually as we target a specific structure where our learners need abundant exposure. ELT materials are packed with stories presented in multimedia, together with videos and multi-sensory activities for the interactive whiteboard in every lesson. The substantial linguistic benefits of using stories in the foreign language classroom have been well documented in the professional literature (Elley 1989, 1991, 2001; Tudor & Hafiz 1989; Drew 2009, Lugossy and Nikolov 2003; Lugossy 2008; Ghosn 2002, 2004, 2007, 2010). Ellis and Brewster (2002) claim that storytelling can create ideal learning conditions since it provides comprehensible input. This story-based input can be authentic or graded, modified or enhanced, or otherwise crafted in any way to suit our teaching purposes.

In terms of teaching methodology, a great strength of story-based teaching is that it provides an overarching thematic context in which learners may integrate practice of all four skills. Story-based tasks that allow us, the teachers, to introduce or revise vocabulary and structures enable form-function mappings (Renandya & Jacobs, 2002). Post-listening or post-reading tasks and language-related activities in which learners talk and write about the story help learners move from the receptive competence needed for listening and reading to the productive competence necessary for talking and writing (Renandya and Jacobs, 2002).

Children’s stories are also ideal for teaching grammar to young learners. For instance, Cameron (2001) considers stories as an appropriate medium for teaching forms relating to tense and aspect, because they have a temporal sequence and language is used for narrative and for dialogue, thus enabling past-present associations. Moreover, Cameron (2001, p. 164) states that the thematic structure of a story, particularly those which evolve around the resolution of a problem may provide a solid pragmatic context which helps learners make form-meaning connections. Many stories involve natural repetition of key vocabulary and phrases or patterns (Brewster et al. 1992, p. 159). Repetition of these forms within the story context helps learners memorize parts of the discourse they are exposed to, thus making repetition more meaningful (Brewster et al., 1992, p. 159).

Moreover, well-known stories, when they are known in the child’s mother tongue, offer the significant advantage of familiarity. This is an important characteristic, because such stories naturally present a context that is familiar to the child through L1 acquisition. Stories in the foreign language that are well-known in the child’s L1 positively build on pre-existing knowledge and schemata that children bring with them (Brewster et al, 1992, p. 158). Contextual familiarity with the story through the L1 lowers the level of linguistic difficulty of the story and raises the learner’s readiness to notice and process features in the input that the learner would not have been developmentally ready to acquire in other, less familiar contexts.

A cross-curricular classroom project on Jason and the Golden Fleece

With the previous points in mind, I would like to share with you my own experience with teaching grammar through stories. It was a cross-curricular classroom project with my Greek EFL 5th year young learner classroom (pupils aged 10-11) and it combined teaching English with the subject of History. My students were exposed to the well-known ancient Greek myth Jason and the Golden Fleece presented in multimedia. The pupils first saw the film Jason and the Argonauts (1963) of this story on DVD. The film was in English with English subtitles. Then, they read the same story in class from the read-along audio CD story book Atticus the Storyteller: 100 Myths from Greece (Coats&Lewis, 2003). The input was authentic and unmodified for language purposes. Together with general practice of the four skills, my own grammar goal was to teach them the Past tense.

Learners then wrote summaries of the story in class. Later, they presented their summaries before their peers and I audio-recorded their presentations and transcribed the oral output. The selected samples provided in this article show how the tasks of summarising and presenting a story led to active intake and accuracy in production of the Simple Past Tense for all learners. The examples show various developmental errors in learners’ interlanguage at this stage; however, I have only chosen to comment on those errors related to the Past tense forms, because this was the focus of my study. The italicized parts show the errors that are relevant to our discussion. Increased comprehension of the story owing to the multimodal presentation (DVD and audio CD read-along story book) did lead to increased and more accurate oral and written production of past tense forms. The combined power of multimedia and contextual familiarity with the story due to the cross-curricular link with the Greek History class made the story-based authentic input much more comprehensible than what it would have been if learners had simply read another- less familiar story- in class.

Examples of learners at work: writing and talking about Jason and Medea

These examples show instances of on-line processing of form (Ellis &Yuan, 2004). Learners produced the correct forms in writing but not in the corresponding speaking task. This is natural because of the time pressure that is there in any speaking activity. But to my surprise, learners used correct forms in their oral summary presentations even though they had not done so in writing. In example 2, we see that the student has used the phrase “Jason wanted the golden fleece” in his oral presentation of his own summary but in his written version he wrote “Jason want the golden fleece”. In Example 1, the student summarised the meeting of Jason and the Argonauts with an old king who could not eat because some mythical beasts, the Harpies, stole his food. The Argonauts fought the beasts and set the king free. The student wrote “Jason and Argonauts kill the Harpies” in his written summary, but he changed the form to “killed” in his oral output. Similarly, in Example 2, the student used the verb “ask” instead of “asked” in the phrase “Jason ask the old woman” in the written version, but in the oral version, the same verb is recited as “askid”, an attempt showing that the student assigned the –ed ending to the verb, even though he did not know the correct pronunciation of the verb. All these examples worked contrary to my own expectations of my young learners. Even though I would expect the learners to pay more attention to form in writing rather than speaking, when time-pressure is not an issue, in this study learners proved themselves able to self-monitor their own speech and make self-corrections “online” as they saw fit.

On-line processing of forms in the oral data was also observed for many other language forms, such as comparatives (heavy…heavier… heavy and heavier) and plural forms (woman…women… woman…), illustrated in Example 2. The many instances of online self-corrections in the oral presentations show that the pupils’ internal language monitor was active during the oral presentation task and that internal editing of their own written output was taking place as they orally presented it in class before their peers. Indeed, most of the past tense forms that were used in the written version of the story were reproduced in the oral version, even when those were used erroneously as in the phrases “Man was sat”, “Jason was fell” where there was an over-use of past tense forms. The fact that most students consistently reproduced past tense inflections, even when their attempts were erroneous, shows that learners were conscious of the grammatical target of the task and that they monitored their output for accuracy as well as meaningfulness.

Moreover, I observed that most students modelled after the story book text reading as they wrote their summaries. The reading passage functioned as a scaffold, providing them with the linguistic resources that they needed to express story-based meanings they understood well in their L1 but that they had to transfer in the L2. For instance, in example 2, the learner appropriated two bits of information derived from the passage (that Jason had carved a wooden statue of the goddess Hera on the ship “Argo” and that he fell into the river and lost his sandal) for which he appropriated the language in his attempt to convey these messages.

On boat Argo, Jason was having a stone statue was Hera
Jason was fell and his one sandal off

In the oral version, the student omitted the first sentence, as well as other parts of his written version of the summary. Quite possibly, the student had difficulty in re-processing and reformulating this meaning orally with the added time pressure factor.

In Example 3, the pupil made certain syntactic errors but these did not impede understanding of the message he tried to convey. These errors showed the student’s attempts to model after the passage in order to expand his linguistic resources; he borrowed chunks such as “The prince got worried because many brave men tried to get the Golden Freece but only died” which he managed to transfer in his oral presentation. His sentence “Medea told to Jason her father will never let to he” was an attempt to say that Medea’s father would not allow Jason to take the Golden Fleece from his country. In spite of the flawed syntax and the lack of certain vocabulary, this goal was achieved. The student also showed active monitoring of his past tense forms; he said “he killed they” referring to the dragons, after he had written “he kill they”.

Example 4 shows that the strategies used to complete this task -modelling after the passage, use of chunks from the passage and omissions of unanalysed chunks- in the oral versions were similar to those used by her peers.

This student also simplified her summary in her oral presentation and omitted some unanalysed chunks of the written version that she had taken from the passage but that were too advanced for her to process –we see that the chunk “if he would take her to Greece” is omitted in the oral excerpt. She also omitted some past tense inflections in her own pushed output which wasn’t copied from the passage; for instance, her use of “and he would also do the same with Jason” in the written summary becomes “he also….also …do the same Jason” in the oral excerpt. These omissions in the oral outputs were also due to the difficulties in pronouncing past tense inflections even when the students knew the verbs should be used in the past tense as it is evidenced from the frequent oral pronunciation errors in past tense like “happenid” for happened, “rememberid” for remembered, “faout” for fought, “saouh” for saw and other commonly observed pronunciation errors throughout the learner portfolios.

The student used the passage as scaffold to provide vocabulary that was necessary for her to narrate the story of how Jason took the golden fleece which was guarded by a dragon. For instance, she wrote “Medea said Jason to wave her magic flower under sepent’s nose and it snoozed”. The verb “snoozed” and “to wave” was noticed in the passage and it was used by the learner because it was meaningful for the purpose of her written description of the relevant scene. It is possible that the student inferred the meaning of this verb either from the teacher’s explanations of the story or from watching this scene in the film. This verb phrase “and it snoozed” and the verb “to wave” were omitted in the oral recital. The verb “to wave” was replaced by the verb “have”. This could mean that the student could not process it fully and had used it as an unanalyzed chunk in her writing.

With regard to the use of the past tense forms, which was the linguistic focus of my observations, the degree of accuracy in the production of Past Tense forms in the written and oral summaries was satisfactory. It seems that the use of Past tense forms was indeed essential for the completion of the tasks. I observed that the number of correct formulations of Past Tense verbs was very high in proportion to the total number of verb phrases used in the texts. The errors made both in the written and oral versions of the story summaries did not involve for the most part past tense verb morphology but other syntactic structures.

Pedagogical themes that emerge from this classroom study

Story-based instruction is compatible with Krashen’s hypothesis on comprehensible input (Krashen, 1985). Krashen’s hypothesis that learners improve and progress when they receive ‘comprehensible’ input that is one step beyond their current stage of linguistic competence is given a concrete form through learner exposure to the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece. In this classroom study, the input was authentic and unmodified; hence not purposefully designed for EFL teaching. The language of the storybook that learners were exposed to was normally beyond their elementary level; it was more likely at a pre-intermediate level. Still, the story input was made more comprehensible through the combined use of multi-modal presentation -DVD, book and audio CD. This mode of presentation allowed for a certain amount of implicit learning as well, particularly for untaught vocabulary items that students could infer from the related scenes that they saw in film and then read and listened to as text. This combination of film viewing and listening/reading to the same story as text proved to be a fruitful instructional option as it allowed learners to make rich form-meaning connections in the story they saw as moving image and then read along as text in class. Classroom practice again supports the idea that grammar should be taught through context (Celce-Murcia, 2002).

The multimodal presentation of the Jason story – film and read-along story book with audio CD - as well as scaffolding support provided in the lessons led pupils to notice and produce language that was far more complex than the language they would have produced using their own linguistic resources exclusively. The passage served as a model that pupils could rely on to produce their own short summaries. The examples illustrated previously show how these young learners absorbed aspects of the input that were meaningful to them in the course of completing a meaningful activity – to summarize the Jason story. In doing so, they not only did notice, but even moved further on to reformulate certain parts from the text using their own linguistic resources. They attempted to use more complex language to convey meaningful and relevant bits of information about this narrative. They also borrowed “unanalysed chunks” from the passage that were meaningful to the task purpose but that the learners at the elementary stage could not have produced on their own. Their collective effort was an indication that they stretched the boundaries of their inter-language to incorporate new more advanced forms- such as reported speech–that they would not have done otherwise. Even when they made mistakes, young learners in this study made a conscious effort to convey meanings from the passage they had read that were beyond their current level of linguistic development. Many pupils attempted to convey meanings using reported speech, modal verbs and passive voice, even though they had not been taught these more advanced grammatical features. Therefore, they made an interesting array of developmental errors which illustrate this attempt at restructuring (Gass and Selinker, 2008, McLaughlin, 1990a) and “pushed output” (Swain, 2005). The examples from this classroom study show clearly that learners did "notice the gap" between the input and their own output and that this noticing resulted in self-correction as it has been proposed by Merrill Swain (2005) and in line with Krashen’s monitor theory.

Lastly, I should say that the story of Jason and the Argonauts had been previously known to the learners in Greek, their mother tongue. The myth of Jason and the Argonauts is taught in Hellenic History 3rd year textbook. This prior knowledge must have contributed to learners’ better general understanding of the story. Contextual familiarity with the story in their L1 (Greek) must have helped learners to infer meanings and talk about the same story in English. My personal feeling is that the themes that have emerged from learner output in this study are likely to be repeated with any other story that has similar characteristics, such as contextual familiarity in the L1 and multimodal presentation in the L2.

I would like to end this article with a thought about learner motivation. When learners get tired of all else, an interesting story will definitely change their mood and drive them to follow through with matching language tasks. Fortunately, we do not have to be good storytellers ourselves, for there is a great wealth of high-end ELT publications available on the Internet with amazing resources that guarantee to arouse the interest of our learners. Our learners enjoy them and learn from them. I find that their joyful learning is the greatest reward of our profession.

References

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Celce-Murcia, M. (2002). Why it makes sense to teach grammar in context through discourse. In E. Hinkel & S. Fotos (Eds.), New perspectives on grammar teaching in second language classrooms (pp. 119-134). Mahwah, NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Coats, L., Lewis, A. (2003). Atticus the Storyteller: 100 Myths from Greece. Orion Children’s.

Drew, I. (2009). Using the early years literacy programme in primary EFLNorwegian classrooms. In M. Nikolov (Ed.), Early learning of modern foreign languages: Processes and outcomes (pp. 108-120). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Elley, W. B. (1989). Vocabulary acquisition from listening to stories. Reading Research Quarterly., 24, 174-187.

Elley, W. B. (1991). Acquiring literacy in a second language: The effect of book-based programs. Language Learning., 41(3), 375-411.

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Ellis, G., & Brewster, J. (2002). The primary English teacher's guide (New ed.). Harlow: Penguin English.

Ellis, R., & Yuan, F. (2004). The effects of planning on fluency, complexity, and accuracy in second language narrative writing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 26(1), 59-84.

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Jason and the Argonauts (1998). Film. Culver City: Columbia TriStar Home Video.

Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.

Krashen, S. (1985). The input hypothesis: issues and implications. London: Longman.

Lugossy, R., & Nikolov, M. (2003). Real books in real schools: Using authentic reading materials with young efl learners. Novelty, 10(1), 66-75.

McLaughlin, B. (1990). Restructuring. Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 113-128.

Richards, J. C., & Renandya, W. A. (2002). Methodology in language teaching : an anthology of current practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Swain, M. (2000 ). The output hypothesis and beyond: Mediating acquisition through collaborative dialogue. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 97-114). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Swain, M. (2005). The output hypothesis: Theory and research. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook on research in second language teaching and learning (pp. 471-484). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Tudor, I., & Hafiz, F. (1989). Extensive reading as a means of input to l2 1earning. Journal of Research in Reading, 12(2), 164-178.

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