Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 4; July 03

Bilingual Story-telling

Lígia Maria and Sandie Mourão, Leiria, Portugal

This is a just one of the outcomes of a very exciting project, which involves English book browsing in Portuguese pre-schools. The project has been financed by Opal Dunn and REALBOOK News and it is with gratitude and friendship that we share just one of the results of a year with REALBOOKs in Portuguese pre-schools.

The main objective of this project was to leave English REALBOOKs in the pre-school book corner and document how the children interacted with these books and stories. However, having never had the opportunity to provide children with a number of REALBOOKs to keep in school, I had no idea how this would affect either the children or their nursery teacher! The project affected the nursery teacher to such an extent that she decided to devote her postgraduate research project to using REALBOOKs.

What I am documenting, with the support of Lígia, the nursery teacher, is pure documentation: a collection of anecdotal statements and observations accompanied by two stories written by the children in Lígia's care. I will not provide any justification or background theory to the introduction of REALBOOKs, of storytelling, of creating stories with children, or even of using both the children's mother tongue and English in the classroom. Instead I feel that by documenting what happened and showing you the results we can come to our own conclusions as to how this kind of activity, with the support of research, can in fact play a very important role in foreign language learning at an early age.

Context

The pre-school where Lígia works is a private one. Lígia looks after the 4/5 year olds, which are also termed pre primary, as the 5 year olds, who begin to turn 6 years in January, will be going to primary school in September of this year. Lígia's pedagogic project was entitled “Crescer com livros” (Growing with books), which speaks for itself. The children have been completely immersed in literature, of all types and the results have been outstanding.

You may shrug your shoulders and say, "but isn't this normal stuff?" I need to state here that working to such an extent with books and classroom libraries is still a rarity in Portugal, for too many reasons to go into in this article. However, it has played a very important role in the way the children have accepted REALBOOKs and with the way they have easily been able to write stories together.

Lígia has always written stories with the children, though until now the stories have been in Portuguese. It made perfect sense to continue using storywriting in her project, and the children were completely at home with this kind of activity.

“My daddy” - A bilingual story

This is Lígia's description of her storytelling activity, with a short preamble. The text in italics is a direct translation of what Lígia has written in Portuguese.

“On realising that my group of children had adopted the books as an integral part of their school library, I felt almost obliged to use them in my own work with the children, therefore taking these storybooks beyond the 30 minute sessions that Sandie gave twice a week. I had to shake off all my feelings of selfconciousness, about having the right pronunciation and saying words incorrectly,, and I started telling these stories too.”

Lígia became very interested in the way the children interacted with the REALBOOKs and their use of English to help her when she told them the stories in storytelling sessions.

“I worked on three of the stories Sandie used with the children. One was included in our Christmas play, Black and White A second, Potty Time! by Guido Van Genechten, was used as a spring board for making puppets, which the children took home to show their parents and also retell the story! A third “My Daddy” again by Guido Van Genechten, was used as part of a postgraduate study I was undertaking at the local teacher training college in Leiria.

This last project began with me reading the story to the children. I divided my 21 children into two groups: I told one group the story in Portuguese, the other group heard the story in English. Sandie had not told the story yet, so this was the first time either group had heard it. I then asked the children questions about the story, to try to understand just how much each group had understood of the two versions.

Sandie then continued to tell the story at the end of her visits, so in fact each child heard the story in English, however only one half of the group ever heard it in Portuguese.”

Lígia went on to work with the children in related activities.

“The children and I began to create our own material based on the story. The children chose to: draw pictures about the story; retell the story, orally in Portuguese and in English; invent songs, one in Portuguese and the other in English; write stories of their own and make them into books for their library.

The book which was made by the group which had only heard the story in English was a natural interaction between the two languages, Portuguese and English. It was fascinating to listen to the children tell their story. As it was Father's Day soon, I suggested they write a story about their daddy. So the title of the book became “My Daddy”. As soon as one child said “O meu daddy tem os olhos (eyes) black e o hair black”, they all followed suit adding their own ideas and thoughts. In fact they disliked the idea that daddy had black eyes and were able toegther to adjust the sentence. “Tudo black?” (All black!) they said! What pleased me most was that I did not have to say once “Diz em ( Say it in) English”. The children were very conscious of using English to tell the story and very enthusiastic about the task.

You can see the story Lígia's children wrote and illustrated at the end of this article. The other group of children also wrote a story, “O meu pai”, "my father) which was in Portuguese, with no English words at all!

“Clown Pastelown” – Another bilingual story

Lígia had requested that I write a story with the children as she wanted them to celebrate “O dia de livro infantile” (The day of the children's book), which falls on 2^nd April. This activity, by chance, came after her bilingual story adventure.

I remember preparing myself for this session with trepidation. I had never done anything quite like this before, I was to say the least, anxious and nervous! Lígia had assured me that the children would do it easily, but I wasn't sure myself just how naturally it would happen. To help the children I decided to use all the visuals we share in English. I make a lot of flashcards and always leave a set in the pre-school classroom, so they were all at hand and available.

We have played with lots of words and lexical groups, and the floor was soon covered in brightly coloured flashcards. You can see from the story they have come up with what kind of words we used and played with. Some may seem a little strange, but where possible English is used as a support for concepts and ideas in Portuguese and I plan content with Lígia, so what I do is part of what she is also working on with the children.

They knew they would be writing a story with me, but no one had made any decisions as to what the story was going to be about! My first question, in Portuguese, was exactly that, “What is the story going to be about?” “Is it about an animal, a person?” They all agreed that the story should be about a clown, because we had recently finished playing with emotion words and a clown's face had been used to demonstrate emotions in English.

“A clown… so what happens to the clown?” (in Portuguese) As they invented their story, I wrote it down!

O Clown comia bananas e outros frutos e vegetables, porque era guloso. Ele comia pizza, fish e carrots. Ele comia carrots porque fazia bem aos eyes, por ter eyes bonitos. (The clown ate bananas and other fruits and vegetables, because he was greedy. He ate pizza, fish and carrots. He ate carrots because they were good for his eyes, so that he had beautiful eyes.)

These three sentences came very quickly and from three different children. It occurred exactly as Lígia had described it, once a child begins others quickly follow suit!

I gave them a prompt, “What did he look like?” (in Portuguese)

Tinha eyes blue, a roupa era de yellow, o cabelo era green e o chapeu era pink. Os sapatos eram red.

(He had blue eyes, his clothes were yellow, his hair was green and his hat was pink. His shoes were red.)

They needed a little more prompting here, as they weren't sure what was to come after they had described his shoes. Lígia encouraged them to think about his face, as he was a clown! They didn't know the word “face” in English, so one child intervened quickly with “head”.

O head dele era white e o nose é de red. Ele era happy!
(His head was white and his nose was red. He was happy!)

Again, each sentence was provided by a different child, though sometimes sentences were heard and then altered by peers, which led to moments of mini-negotiation!

We stopped again, wondering what to include next and I suggested we give him a name; it was odd calling him just clown! They agreed and came up with typical names like João or Miguel or André, until one child suggested that he should be called “Pastelão”, which means “slow eater”. I said the word in an English way, making it rhyme with clown, as the Portuguese “ão” is said like ”own” in “clown”. It was a hit, the children loved the anglicised “Pastelown” and this became his name!

O Clown Pastelown bebia milk para fazer bem aos teeth.
(Clown Pasteown drank milk, which was good for his teeth.)

The children were stuck on food! So I suggested they think about something else he liked…

O Clown Pastelown gostava das animais: frogs, rabbits e elephants. Ele dava a comida a mouth dos animais.
(Clown Pastelown liked animals: frogs, rabbits and elephants. He gave them food through their mouths.)

They were obsessed with food! “So what food did he give them?” I asked, in Portuguese.
They really enjoyed deciding what it was each animal should eat and came to a group consensus quickly, accepting what peers suggested with joy!

Ao rabbit dava carrots, ao elephant dava fish e ao frog dava cake. Ao giraffe dava ice-cream.
(He gave carrots to the rabbits, fish to the elephant and cake to the frog. He gave icecream to the giraffe.)

“So did Clown Pastelown live by himself?” (in Portuguese)

O Clown Pastelown vivia com a sua mulher e um baby, e o brother, e eram um happy family! (Clown Pastelown lived with his wife and a baby, and his brother, and they were a happy family!)

By now they were tired, we had been at it for about 10 minutes and they wanted to play some games and sing a song! We stopped and I read back their story, which they all agreed was very good!

I took the text home, put it on the computer, a sentence or two per page and then brought it back for them to illustrate. Hey presto, a bilingual story illustrated and bound for their classroom library. I made four copies, so that all the children could illustrate a page, this also meant that even though we had identical stories, they were all visually different. The children consult their storybooks as regularly as any other of their library books.

Ligia Maria is a Portuguese nursery teacher, who believes strongly in following the Asocial Modern (Highscope) theories of teaching and learning. She has been working with pre-school children for eight years and has just finished a postgraduate study in education.

Sandie Mourão is a teacher and teacher trainer, who has worked with children and their teachers for over a decade. She is very interested in working with REALBOOKs and the use of play in foreign language learning.