Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 5; September 02

Chaving another Teller's Story.

Time: 30 to 45 mins

Purpose: to help students hear, feel and empathetically re-invent a native-speaker's narrative.

Preparation: arrange for a native to come to your class for half an hour, ready to tell two stories about things that have happened to her.

Lesson Outline:

1. Introduce the native-speaking story teller and ask the class to prepare to listen to the story with a view to some people re-telling it.
   Ask them to listen to the story paying attention to the following areas:
   • pauses and speed of speech,
   • body posture and gesture: hands and face
   • the rhythm of the words and phrases used.

2. Ask the guest to give a little sniff of each of her two stories.
   The students then vote on which one they want to hear .
   Ask the students to listen with full attention. Ask them not to take written notes.

3. The guest tells, seated if possible.

4. Pair the students. In each pair Person A takes on the teller's body posture and re-tells the story as much as possible with the same gestures, the same body posture and the same speech rhythms as the teller.

5. The teller tells her story again to the whole group.

6. .. In each pair, Person B tells the story as close to the second telling as possible.

7. Allow time for the students and the native teller to give each other feedback.

Note: this exercise will be done best by the naturally empathetic students, the ones with high language and inter-personal ability.
The exercise is not worth doing as a one-off. The students get better and better at it as they practise more.

Variation: in a same-Mother Tongue class, change step 6 above so that Person B tells the story to A with the same rhythm, gestuality etc as the teller, but in Mother tongue, not English. This a marvellously hard task, requiring great linguistic flexibility.