I ask Andrew Wright, author of Storytelling with Children and Creating Stories with Children about using stories in language classes. Are stories more than a vehicle for teaching language? How should teachers react to students’ creations? And what can teachers do to encourage creativity with learners when writing stories.
Motivation and Meaning Through Stories (with Andrew Wright)
Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." This week our guest is Andrew Wright. Andrew's an author, illustrator, teacher, and storyteller.
In this episode, I asked Andrew about some of the differences between getting students to study language and getting students to experience language, what it is that makes stories so appropriate for language learning. Then finally, Andrew shares with us some really practical ideas on how to use stories in language teaching. Enjoy the episode.
Ross: Andrew, to start off, can you tell us a bit about the difference between students studying language and experiencing language?
Andrew Wright: I'm just flabbergasted that this huge fact, which we all share, is that the word doesn't exist except through another medium. The other medium can represent that word neutrally, or represent it and add meaning. I can say, "add meaning" and here I'm emphasizing "add" by saying add meaning.
We language teachers assume that language means words. It's absolutely bizarre this, because a word can only be manifested through another medium, so when I'm speaking, I'm vocalizing the word. Everybody knows if they think about it that the voice can make a word recognizable and the voice at exactly the same time can deny its meaning.
Thank you. I love you. Which is the more powerful? The voice. Then you say, "Oh, but when it's written," of course when it's written, but what are we going to have? How are we going to have a Serif face or Sans‑serif face? Is it going to be handwriting? You add onto that the face and the hands when you are speaking.
Whenever a word is spoken, it's part, at least, of a duet and very often part of a quintet. I can only think that the tradition of language teaching and language teacher training has been through that selection of the language which is studied. It's been studied.
You know that the word study and student really means either listening to a teacher or reading a text and learning it, so you're studying it. Instead of saying learner and the learner might study at some point, but the learner might be experiencing.
Ross: Tell us about stories then. What is it that makes stories so appropriate for language learning and how is it that stories usually get used in the language learning process?
Andrew: The stories are central to being a human being, and so the traditional use of stories which is just to use them as a technique for teaching languages is fundamentally wrong. If you took the notion of love, for example, which to everybody must be precious in one way or another.
If you were to say, "Let's use love as a technique for teaching foreign languages." Let's look at the words that we use with love and how do we emphasize love? I love you very much. All right, repeat everybody, I love you very...This is disgusting.
That idea of stories is what you asked me and language teaching. Yes, because it's central to who we are. This is how we make sense of the world and this is how we share our sense of the world. It is just huge and it's not always words, but words play a big role. How can it not be a central highway in language teaching? How can it not be? It's bizarre to think that it could be anything else.
Why would you leave out what is central to our lives? Remembering that stories are not just "Little Red Riding Hood," but the newsreaders in the English language say, "The top stories today are...They're all storytelling." They say, "The breaking story. The story I'm working on."
That's the idea that, yes, stories are central to who we are as human beings and words play a major part, so how can they not be central to language teaching. That doesn't mean that you take stories and then crucify them.
If you have a goose that lays golden eggs, be happy that it lays a golden egg every day. That stupid farmer that we always hear about and his wife decided that they wanted to analyze how the goose laid the eggs, so they killed the goose to open it up to see it was dead and never laid another egg.
That's what happened, for example, with Tom, my son Tom. When my son Tom was 11, he's just started school seven years ahead of him of development. One evening, I went up to say goodnight, but he was already asleep.
By his bed was his English book. I opened it. He'd just written a story called The End of the World in five lines. The teacher had written underneath two spelling mistakes, "Correct them."
Breakfast time, I said to him, "Tom, you write very economically. You wrote a story called The End of the World in five lines." Then this little boy said, "There's something you learn at school. The less you do, the less mistakes you can make." He wasn't going to start giving himself as a human being through stories because he realized that his customer was obsessed by error.
A lot of teachers these days have adopted this so‑called communicative approach. One of our teachers in our school here that I do like very much and I know he does a great job. He is a man who has built up his whole life in knowing English from top to bottom. His narrative about himself is that that is who he is.
If you were to say to him, "What really matters is the relationship that you have with your students as a human being." That relationship has talking, writing, reading, and sharing is central to being able to have the relationship. Development in those skills is a byproduct of trying to share effectively.
Being able to dribble the ball in football is a byproduct of wanting to do well on Saturday in the match. Now, this teacher we had, I sat in on his lesson, and he was asking the students, "What did you do last weekend?" Clearly, practicing past tenses. One of them said to him, "I swim across Lake Balaton doing butterfly." He said, "Swam."
After the lesson, I said to him, I said, "That guy I told you, he swam across Lake Balaton doing butterfly. Lake Balaton is the biggest lake in Central Europe. Butterfly swimming is hard. He shared with you an incredible achievement and all you said was swam."
He appeared to be somebody was sharing humanity because he'd taken the surface notion of that by asking people about their weekend, but he actually wasn't. He was just doing drill practice.
Ross: That's a really powerful example that the teaching caring so much more about the grammar than the content. In a way there, that student was beginning to tell the teacher his story. The teacher was really only impressed in the surface level.
Can you tell us more about the role that teachers should play in getting students to tell their own stories, Andrew? If that was an example of what not to do, what should teachers do?
Andrew: The traditional role for the teacher who is using stories and writing stories is to get them to write stories to test their level. They write a story, like my son Tom, knows he's writing a story for the teacher to Mark to give back to him.
My suggestion to teachers is that, it should be a totally different relationship. The teacher is acting as their helper to publish. Not every story that they write but, a lot of the stories they write should be not for the classroom, not for the teacher. They are for the world.
You're saying to the students all the time, "This is going to be in a book." Or, "It's going to be on the school website." I always say at the beginning if I'm with a new class, "Don't think I'm going to be choosing the best story because that makes me sick the idea of choosing the best."
Who am I to say it's the best story? Everybody's story will be published unless you come to me and say you don't want it to be because it's your property. It's your copyright. If you don't want to publish it, you don't publish it.
With one school in Austria, I did this for two weeks every year for 21 years. Everyone was published as a book and the result was when I did those weeks with them, it was always not in the school, but we went away for a week to a hostel ‑‑ you could call it. Every evening meal, there would be a queue of students.
While I was eating, wanting to show me their work because they wanted to get it right. They would be saying, "Can you help me to get the grammar right? Can you help me to do this sentence better?" I wasn't marking their things. I wasn't going through them with a red pen saying, "Three spelling mistakes. Correct them."
They were coming to me, begging me, "Please help me." They weren't doing it for me. They were doing it because it was going to go into the school library. There was going to be an exhibition in the bookshop in Linz.
In the main bookshop, I got them to agree to have an exhibition of all the stories in this book. They knew that. They knew that their parents and friends would be going to the bookshop to see it. I also reminded them that one day their grandchildren will be saying, "Which is your story granddad?"
I said, "You want it to be good. Won't you for your grandchildren?" These were 12‑, 13‑year‑old boys and girls. It was a huge privilege to work with them. It was moving beyond description as there was all of them were desperate to try to do a good job.
Ross: What about for teachers that don't maybe have the resources to publish students' stories in a book? What are some of the other options there?
Andrew: Performances, videoing their stories, just giving them to the neighboring class, or inviting the school director to come into the class, and then we tell the school director our stories and he has to sit there.
Ross: Finally, tell us more then about getting students to create their own stories. What are some experiences that you've had doing that? How can you really, as a teacher, encourage students to be creative?
Andrew: In Denmark ‑‑ I can't remember which town it was ‑‑ we did a bookmaking session using rubbish in the school. They began the lesson with me going around all the dustbins and they found, for example, wood, paper plates. One of them cut this round paper plate, a dinner plate.
On the dinner plate, they wrote in a diminishing circle a story, so they had to turn the plate round. They got a sharp knife and they cut between the lines so that it then fell down inside here like a spiral, and then it sat on the top.
Then the story was about two boys in a classroom in Denmark when suddenly a hole appeared in the classroom floor and they fell through the Earth all the way through to Australia. To read it, they had to turn over and look in it like that, and turn it round.
Another boy found a brick with holes in it. He got a very, very long paper. He wrote the story on a very long strip of paper and he threaded it through the brick. Then he made me sit down and he said, "This is a brick and a paper book." I had to thread the paper through.
Another one, I got an ordinary piece of A4 paper and then he wrote his story in mirror writing. He got a mirror, put it on the table, put the paper into a cone, you look through the top of the cone and you could read the story in the mirror.
Ross: One more time everyone, that was Andrew Wright. Look out for Andrew's books on stories for language learning. There are two, "Storytelling with Children" and "Creating Stories with Children."
Also, check out Andrew's website, andrewarticlesandstories.WordPress.com. There are lots of other fantastic tips there about using stories to help students learn language as well as some examples of Andrew's own stories.
Thanks for listening, check out our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.