Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 5; September 03

Story-Telling in ELT

Edited by Amos Paran and Eleanor Watts
IATEFL, 3 Kingsdown Chambers, Kingsdown Park,
Whitstable, Kent CT5 2DJ, UK

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Paran and Watts open their introduction by quoting Auden:

“ Present in every human being are two desires, a desire to know the truth about the primary world , the given world inside ourselves in which we are born, live, love, hate and die, and the desire to make new secondary worlds of our own or, if we cannot make them ourselves, to share the secondary worlds of those who can.”

The headings of the introduction will give you a feel for its message:

Diversity of source
Diversity of story type
Diversity of story-telling style
Diversity of teaching suggestions
An emphasis on further creative story-telling
An emphasis on practical work
An emphasis on interpretation
A combination of many teaching techniques
How to use this book
Stories for Children- stories for adults
Adapting and changing

Andrew Wright, one of EFL's master story-tellers, has written a piece that follows the introduction. In this he writes:

“ Everybody wants a story but not all the time. If you try to tell a story at the wrong moment, it does not matter how skilful you are, you will probably not succeed. Help the students to become story-ready, perhaps by holding the same story-bag you always hold when you are going to tell a story….. or sitting on the same chair in the same way… or perhaps playing the same piece of music. “

To my mind, the above paragraph epitomises a humanistic state of mind and heart.

The most interesting bit of my article in this volume is the introduction of bi-lingual or sandwich story-telling. Suppose you are beginners in Greek, I can get you to understand some words of this glossas by the careful way I place them in my istoria. Now this istoria I want to tell you is all about an arkutha, a bear. She was a big, brown arkutha, I guess you will have been to the zoo and seen plenty big, brown arkuthes there………

By the end tis istorias mu ( of my story) you will be able to aurally recognise 20-30 words in the target language. You are also absorbing grammar, without paying any attention to it.

The body of the book contains stories from all over the World, sent in by IATEFL members, accompanied by practical, commonsensical lesson plans.

Congratulations to Eleanor and Amos, to the IATEFL members who contributed stories, and to the Association for offering this kind of publishing opening at a time when the main publishers are more and more run by accountants, not book people.

Mario Rinvolucri