Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 5; September 2000

by Andrew Wright

Stories

The whole range of stories I refer to above are relevant to the idea of being Greek in English. However, I would like to enthuse a little about the Greek myths. The Greek myths have influenced all Western societies and more broadly, the world at large. For me the Greek myths are not mere curiosities of a past culture but living metaphors for our hopes, fears, aims, for love, treachery and passion. I have no problem in telling Greek myths to large classes of teenage students; they are gripped. Teachers say to me afterwards, 'Do you realise you have had all the naughtiest students in the school in this room and I could have heard a pin drop.' 'I have never heard silence like that before, in this school!'

The students listen and they retell and make the stories their own. And they can practise retelling with the idea that they really will tell Greek myths in the families where they will stay when they go to Britain or North America, just as they might sing a Greek song or dance a Greek dance.

The stories which are the most useful for the language classroom and, later, the hosts' dinner table, are the shorter ones rather than the long sagas like the labours of Hercules. I recommend, for example:

Orpheus
Demeter and Persephone
Narcissus and Echo
Bellerophon and Pegasus
King Midas

But also help the students to learn those extra little snippets like the story of Tithonus the cicada.

Here is a version of the story using lower proficiency level English.

Eos loved Tithonus. She didn't want him to die. She asked the Gods, "Please let Tithonus live for hundreds and thousands of years. Let him live for ever!"
The Gods agreed. Wonderful? No! Eos forgot to ask for Tithonus to be young. He became older and older and older. He became thinner and thinner and smaller and smaller until he became a cicada. Eos didn't love him anymore! Tithonus was very angry. He couldn't shout because he was very little so he rubbed his hard, thin stick legs against each other and made a high, thin noise every evening and every night.

I advise that the students discuss the values and perceptions evidenced in the stories so that they can link their storytelling to whatever conversations are going on before they launch into their story telling. Of course, the students need a reasonable proficiency level of English to discuss stories…if their level is too low to do it satisfactorily then you might, for example, offer them five sentences expressing different opinions on the story and ask them to put them into their order of preference…you can adapt the activity out of Dictation by Mario Rinvolucri and Paul Davis, Cambridge University Press in which the teacher dictates five sentences about the story and the students write them at the top of the page if they agree with them, in the middle if they half agree with them and at the bottom if they don't agree with them.

Of course you want the students to get their English right but emotionally it is more important to help the students to work on their craft of telling. The craft of telling is a big subject but I can list a few points which might be of some practical use. If you want to see more then look at Storytelling with Children OUP…or come on one of my Craft of Storytelling courses in Godollo. Write to me for details.

Here are some of the basic considerations in developing a craft of storytelling:

1 Usually listeners have to be prepared in some way for the idea that you are going to launch into a story…unless it is a short personal anedote.

2 Always concentrate on how you can give the story and your feelings about it to the listener rather than thinking about yourself.

3 Of course, tell the story with feeling and put everything you have got into it.

4 The main components are: the gist of the story, crucial details, rich and precise words, expressive use of voice and body.

The students can work in groups to develop these skills and you can make audio and video recordings to study and analyse.

We are the stories we hear and make.

Our bodies are made out of the food we eat and our minds out of the stories we have heard and made.

The fundamental developmental importance of stories is significant to the language teacher if the teacher accepts her or his responsibility for contributing to the building of the individual student's values, perceptions, identity and relationships with others.

All teachers do affect the personal growth of students, particularly young students, whether the teachers accept partial responsibility for this or not! For this reason I will note some of ways in which stories play a central part in our society at the adult level as well as for children. Stories are certainly not just for little children!

A few years before my mother died she asked me if I believed in an after life and in being able to speak to the dead. In those days I believed that truth was the most important thing and I said, "No"! Today I would probably be, at least, evasive in my reply. My mother was not gloomy about her own impending death except in so far as it would cut her off from the family she loved. That is why she hoped for the possibility of talking to us once she had 'gone to the other side'. My mother accepted what I said, but replied, "But you must admit one thing! We live on in the people we have affected. Even a smile at a bus stop affects us but how much more so a life of stories and shared experiences."

When my mother died my brother and I had to sort out all her things…and decide what to do with them. In her later years she had bought some rather good naturalistic water colours of Derbyshire which she loved. John and I agreed to sell them. The dealer who had sold the pictures to my mother agreed to come to the house. I expected him to be a ruthless business man and I had my price ready and all my determination not to budge!

The dealer came, sat down, looked at the first picture and said how nice it was! I was amazed! This was no way to do business!

"Your mother was woman of great taste!" he said. "These are excellent pictures!"
"How much will you give me for them?"
"No, you are selling them. You must tell me the price you want for them!"

I gave him my upper price expecting to have to begin to bargain. He took out his cheque book and signed a cheque without speaking a word. He gave the cheque to me and said, "I can't cheat your mother! They are worth twice as much!"
My mother lived on in his action.

In 1997 the DNA of a 9000 year old skeleton found in the Chedder Gorge, in England, was examined. A local man, Adrian Targett, whose family, as far as he knew, had always lived in the Chedder Gorge area was found to have some crucially identical parts of the same DNA pattern. Adrian now knows that he is descended from the man whose skeleton was found in the cave! Adrian said that he had often been in the cave but had never known that it was his family home. Physically, people of only 9000 years ago looked just like us…dress them up and put them on a bus and you wouldn't think about it.

My mother was right; we live on in other people. How many of Adrian's gestures are similar to those of his ancestor from 9000 years ago…the way he walks and smiles? But what about his values and perceptions? What about his stories and the roles and behaviour he lives by? We are the stories we have heard and the stories we make.

I have lived in Hungary for about five years. I have not settled down here in the sense of adopting the Hungarian story as my own. On the other hand I am apart from my own story setting. In England I could feel the meaning of every stone in an old building, I could see the ridge and furrow in contemporary fields and 'see' the peasant making them in the middle ages before the fields were enclosed. When I use the word cow I can 'see' the Saxon farmers raising the cows. When I use the word beef I can see the Norman French speaking invaders eating the meat (boeuf).

Sometimes, in this different story setting, I feel 'story less' and barren and lost. Without stories we are without identity. Stories bring us into being.

But what sort of stories should we live by?

Once, in Vancouver, a man called Croft Island, a dealer in real estate who was small, wore a coffee coloured raincoat whenever I saw him and always wore dark glasses so that I never saw his eyes, suggested that I live in North America. I said I would miss my family furniture which dates back to 1650 and my friends and the ridge and furrow in the fields and the sound of the curlew high on the moors.

Croft replied, as he drove his long Chrysler smoothly through the traffic, "Listen! I don't own anything. Not this car, not my home, not my clothes, not even my shades! And I'll tell you something, I don't even own my name. I just invented it one day and had it accepted in law."

Could you live in a life story in which you just hire yourself another story to live in? Who is Croft Island? I am not too worried about the possibility of his reading this part of the article…he will have a new name by now, I suppose…and may even have no memory of the man I met.

At an art school where I was a lecturer many years ago a colleague asked his students to write down ten things about their values and behaviour and ten things about their habits. He then asked them to spend one week living out the exact opposite of each one. He told me that some of the students never returned to their previous stories!

When people experience a sudden and horrific tragedy their lives are destroyed and specialist psychiatrists have to be brought in to help them to sort things out. They are living in their story and suddenly a calamity hits them and knocks them out of their story. One moment the people in Locherbie, in Scotland, were living out their normal evening lives at home and the next moment the airplane, blown up above them, crashed onto their village. People in a state of shock, stare, hardly respond to normal events around them. They have been derailed. A train without a track goes nowhere.

The psychiatrists must help them to build a new story which allows them to incorporate this horrific change to their circumstances.

Of course some people have a story which incorporates the notion of change and even of inevitable disaster so that when it comes it is not so shocking for them and they recover more quickly.

We are facing a millennium of great changes. Are the stories we are giving our students flexible enough for them to adapt to change, even horrific change. On the other hand, do the stories we are giving them offer stability and security, identity but the strength of good relationships with others?

There is no story we can give our students which does not contain values and perceptions. One bar of chocolate doesn't do anyone any harm…regular chocolate makes you fat and makes your teeth drop out. One story manifesting questionable values probably does no harm to anyone but a regular diet of stories offering violence as a solution to problems, offering narrow roles for men and women, etc.?

Are stories and mental health the concern of the language teacher? Each teacher decides.

I would like to take a different tack and look at other analogies for the phenomenon I am calling story.

Some people refer to 'maps' and 'life maps' which are given to us and which we modify and which we travel across.

Some people refer to our 'path'…a lit path through darkness with bottomless depths of chaos on either side.

Some people refer to our 'films' in which we are the director who has to adapt to a real setting not a studio controlled one. The film is partly the result of what the weather is like at the time of shooting…and is partly the result of the performance of the various actors although we are also casting director and we have done our best to choose who we want for each part…just what our wife should be like and what she should think and behave like…we are our costume director…at least of ourselves as protagonist…some people place themselves in a minor role in their own film and others demand the central role.

Some people prefer to think of living in their own 'soap opera'.

I believe the travelling actors in the Commedia del Arte didn't have a fixed script but entered situations in character and responded according to their characters.

Our lives are loosely scripted…

We are loosely knitted together by our stories…

Well! Well! Well! This is all pretty ethereal stuff…full of trendy assertions!

But…

The British royal family has appointed a 'spin doctor', a person whose job it is to find good stories about his or her employer and to give them to the press. He or she might even tell the queen how to dress, have her hair done, how to modulate her voice and what to say.

But you might argue that the British royal family is presented as a story so it is not surprising that they should employ a professional storymaker and teller to do it for them!

The British government employs spin doctors…or, at least, the British New Labour party does. Their job is to send good stories about Labour to the press and to find and write up and send bad stories about the other parties to the press!

Every political party in the West employs spin doctors.

Every car advertisement on the television tells a story rather than giving a list of technical information. You buy a car as a ticket into a story as much as a way of getting from A to B. The news readers of BBC, Sky News and CNN begin the news by saying, "The top stories today are…". How honest journalists are! They begin by telling us that they are going to tell us a story albeit based on a selection of information from 'real' facts.

The toughest and most powerful people in the world: politicians, the bosses of commerce, warlords and church leaders and media chiefs all know that controlling stories means controlling the way people think and behave.

We are in a world made of stories and in so far as we, as teachers, feel partly responsible in influencing how our students grow, so we will, or will not, take the role of stories in language teaching, very seriously indeed.

Further reading

Morgan, J. and M. Rinvolucri. 1983. Once Upon a Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This was the first book in the field of using stories in foreign language teaching and is excellent.

Rosen, B. 1988. And None of It Was Nonsense. London: Mary Glasgow Publications.

The author has done a lot of work using Greek myths with inner city London teenagers.

Wright, A. 1995. Storytelling with Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This book offers ways of helping students to respond to stories, most of the activities can be applied at most proficiency levels.

Wright, A. 1997. Creating Stories with Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This book offers ways of helping students to make stories.

Andrew Wright is an author, illustrator, teacher trainer and storyteller. As an author he has written books for Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Longman. His books include: Storytelling with Children, OUP; Five Minute Activities, CUP: 1000 + Pictures for Teachers to Copy, Longman. As a storyteller he has worked with about 40,000 students in the last ten years in about ten countries.