ONCE UPON A VIDEO
A project around videoing a story
Secondary adult
Neil Harris, Scarborough, UK
Level: Pre-Intermediate - Advanced
Target Audience: Teenagers (Would also work with adults)
Language / Skills Focus: Reading, Speaking, Writing and Pronunciation
Materials: Copy of source story (if an internationally known story, ideally in English and the language of the learners), Writing Good Stories and Making Good Videos handout, Video camera and television, Computer (Optional)
BACKGROUND
One of the features of using stories in the ELT classroom is that it lends itself to teachers and learners from many different backgrounds. Exponents from such diverse approaches as grammar translation, the lexical approach and areas of humanistic language teaching can all find great value is using stories in their teaching. In the multilingual classroom, the context in which I work, two aspects of stories which I (and hopefully my learners) particularly value are the ability of stories to "help bridge common ground between cultures and bring out cultural differences" (Taylor, p.3) and to create a meaningful link between content-based instruction, which is often expected by learners, learning institutions and parents, and values education.
Cahill and Halpern's concept of "The Ceremonial Circle" which has been developed by Michael Berman as the "Lesson as Ceremony", will clearly benefit teenagers as they struggle to come to terms with their identity and ethical issues. As Berman has shown, the act of telling the beginning of a story with the words "Once upon a time" allows for severance, while listening to the story and then working with its moral allow for the dimensions of sacred time and space and then reincorporation. However, while children and adults are usually enchanted by stories and the act of telling and listening to them, teenagers are often less willing to work with stories, often complaining that "stories are for kids". So how can we overcome this reluctance to work with stories, thereby enabling teenage learners to benefit from their linguistic and educational value? The purpose of this article is to show one way in which storytelling, one of the oldest of linguistic activities, can combine with the video camera, one of the more recent additions to the language classroom, to engage teenage learners. I would like to thank Dan, My and Giorgio, my three teenage teachers, for showing me the way and I dedicate this article to them.
I teach English in a medium-sized private language school in the UK and each summer face the challenge of adjusting from teaching Business English and preparing learners for exams to working with teenagers. In my experience, a combination of project work and a negotiated syllabus works particularly well with teenage learners and I have been using this approach for a number of years. Each Monday, the learners decide which project interests them for that particular week (equating to between seven and eight hours of class contact time) from a choice of projects which includes preparing a Scarborough Survival Guide for Teenagers, a class website or magazine and working with stories from the learners' cultures. Perhaps because of the perception that stories infantilize the learning experience, working with stories is an unusual choice and was chosen for the first time in June this year, by three teenagers, two from Sweden and one from Italy. My initial reaction was a mixture of delight and panic! How would this work, given the age range (two thirteen year olds and a strapping eighteen year old, of between Intermediate and Upper Intermediate level)? A solution was soon at hand "Can't we video the story?" asked My, the daughter of a Swedish film director. What follows is an account of our journey into "Once upon a video"
IN CLASS
1. Students negotiate a story to use as the basis of their project
My initial rubric was as follows:<
STORIES FROM YOUR CULTURES. Get together to pool traditional stories from your countries, write them up and tell the class at the end of the week. You can use drama, music...
Aesop's Fables is an excellent resource as the individual stories are short and are known by many cultures. Clearly an alternative source is required when working with learners from other storytelling cultures.
This stage of the project not only requires the ability to tell (or summarise) individual stories, but as a task also requires the language of opinion, justification and possibly ranking. Lower level groups could, if necessary, do part of this activity in L1.
2. (Optional) Students work with the different versions of the source text looking at content and language
The popularity of Aesop's Fables, at least in Europe, means that many of the fables are available on the Internet in a range of languages. The fable chosen by my group was "The Field Mouse and the Town Mouse" (Number 243 in the Penguin edition), which was adapted by Montaigne as "The Town Mouse and the City Mouse", the version which seems to have influenced the video made by my learners.
This easy availability of the fable enabled me to find an Italian version of the text, http://web.tiscali.it/ditic/Esopo/Iltopodicittacampagna.htm, Il topo di cittą e il topo di campagna in which dinner at the Town Mouse's house is disturbed by the household's dogs, and an English version, which expands the original story, giving the mice names and having them face dangers from hungry cats and juggernauts
http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/9511/cityandcountrymouse.html
At this stage of the project, the ways in which the different versions of the source text are used can be adapted to suit different teaching contexts and learner needs. Knowing that the final product was to be a video version of the story, I simply asked the learners to identify the differences between the stories in terms of content (use of names, plot, characters) and to pick out those features they wished to use themselves. Alternatives include work on contrastive discourse analysis (looking at the different language systems exemplified by the L1 and L2 texts), choosing which version is the most popular (a ranking activity) or phonological exploitation, working with stress and intonation.
3. Students rewrite the source story
The problem of plagiarism goes deeper than the assumption that students are lazy - in many ways attitudes to non-referencing sources reflects differences in academic culture. My concern at this stage was that the group would end up reading out loud one of the versions to camera, thereby limiting their learning and their enjoyment. To avoid this problem, it is best to create a genuine need for a new version of the written text , by altering one aspect of the written act, like the register, the target reader or the text type,. I therefore decided to ask the students to rewrite the story collaboratively on computer, the group deciding to make the story relevant to the 23rd century. To facilitate this stage, and knowing that it would lead to the making of a video, I distributed a handout, asking the learners to think about the characters, the plot, the setting and the moral of the story (Writing Good Stories and Making Good Videos).
Collaborative writing on PC facilitates peer correction and my suggested change to the story required the learners to use their creativity to make an ancient text a very modern one. As a result the Town Mouse teleports himself around the world and eats food in the form of pills which are prepared in a microwave. Even the setting of the story changed, with Milan becoming home to the sophisticated and wealthy Town Mouse and the Swedish countryside the home of the Country Mouse. This interim writing activity not only prepares the learners for the next stage of the project, but also gives them the opportunity to be creative and practise the writing skill. Language correction was largely dealt with as it arose by the learners themselves, although some errors were highlighted by me on screen in bold. The group then worked together to discuss the nature of the error and to find a suitable correction, which was then discussed with me. Once we were all happy with the story, we were ready to move on to the penultimate stage of the project.
4. Dialogue Preparation
With the new story ready, the students were asked to prepare the dialogue for the video. At this stage it is important that the students are clear about how the video will be filmed. Does the story have a narrator or is it told through the actions and dialogue of the cast? Interesting effects can be achieved by changing the stance of the narrator (omniscient or first person narration) and by introducing different theatrical conventions, including Kabuki. Initially it is best to keep to relatively simple conventions, with more creative approaches possible once those involved have more experience. For this first attempt, we agreed that Giorgio would act as narrator and Dan and My would be the Town and Country Mouse respectively. This knowledge allowed them to write the text which they were later to perform, which again was written collaboratively on PC and improved by peer and teacher correction.
This second stage of writing, preparing the video narrative and dialogue as required, is crucial to the success of the video. If working with Aesop's fables or something similar, it is likely that the length of this text will be considerably longer than the story rewrite text described above. In particular, students should be encouraged to consider differences between written and spoken texts in terms of formality (including the use of contractions, choice of lexis and features of spoken grammar, depending on the level of the learners involved). As the teacher, don't settle for second best but really encourage the students to flex their spoken language muscles, encouraging them to think about fillers, and in performance the importance of procedural meaning plus aspects of turn-taking and back channel cues. In my experience, teenagers are happy for you to push them to the very limits of the linguistic competence as you and they are working with a text which they have a direct interest in and they can see the benefits of guided reformulation and error correction when applied to their text.
Once the text is ready to the satisfaction of the learners and the teacher, the time has come to practise the dialogue. This is best achieved, if time permits, with a combination of intensive tabletop work on aspects of pronunciation and acting out the script, ideally recorded on video for feedback purposes. It is important to strike a balance between developing the linguistic without losing the magic of storytelling - if the learners are looking bored or frustrated, it's probably time to start filming. Initially my group were concerned that I expected them to learn their lines by heart. However, the extent of their input at all times of the project meant that they quickly realised they knew the script by heart anyway, enabling them to focus on acting the story and on their delivery of the script.
5. Filming
The procedure for filming should be relatively simple, since those involved will already have discussed how the video should look in Stage 4 above. One issue to consider here is where the video is pointing at at any given time - as a close-up on one of the actors or on the whole "stage". This will largely be dictated by the conditions in which the video is being made, but should be addressed before your final take. And don't forget to make sure you have enough video tape and that the camera is switched on, two mistakes I made when less used to using video cameras.
6. Post-Filming Activities
Most obvious is watching the video! The above project was made by three teenagers, while ten others were involved in two different projects, all requiring my undivided time and energy. It is not possible in these circumstances to be with each project group all the time, but the trust and expectations of maturity I placed in the group (admittedly a well-behaved but certainly not atypical mixture of teenage Swedes, Italians, Spaniards, Libyans, Turks and Saudi Arabians) was returned in full. Because each member of the class had been involved in choosing their own project, motivation was high, leading to a happy and energetic classroom dynamic. By Friday, each group was eager to show what it had achieved and the showing of the video created great excitement.
Interestingly, Dan, Giorgio and My had altered their story's moral, which now taught that people (or mice!) from different countries have different ways of behaving. Without knowing it, they had generated a whole new project, this time filmed as a PowerPoint presentation, on cultural difference. Values education and language teaching really were brought together, their "Once upon a video" providing participants and viewers alike with a strong sense of reincorporation, which naturally lead into follow-up activities around the topic of culture and cultural difference. The exact nature of follow-up activities which are created in response to this act of reincorporation will depend on the moral of the story used, but might include discussion and role play, a writing task or a survey of attitudes. Language activities will suggest themselves based on the needs and interests of the learners involved, but if the writing and video stages of this project are seen within a task-based framework, ideas for structural, lexical or pronunciation work are likely to be generated.
Please check the The Secondary Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
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