This article is another installment in our new Helping Superheroes Teach series. The aim of this new series is to offer teachers helpful strategies and practical tips they can implement in their classrooms. In our eyes, teachers are superheroes, and we recognize them for their commitment to improving students’ lives. We hope you find these tips and suggestions helpful. And if you have ideas you would like to share with other teachers, please let us know. We would love to publish your article on our platform. You can reach out to us at esl_marketing@pearson.com
By Jeremy Schaar
In 2007, I saw first-hand how powerful stories are for getting students excited about learning English.
I was teaching at a language academy in Chicago. It wasn’t a great school. There were never enough working CD players, and we bled each board marker dry. The teachers and students all knew it was a temporary gig/school until they could figure out something better. Still, we had fun like you have fun at a train station or a summer camp. The impermanence of it all was freeing, and the diversity of people was exciting.
One of my favorite students was an environmental lawyer from Poland who was a bartender in Chicago. He was irate when I met him. He’d signed up for Business English only to find himself in my Short Stories class. (They were both in a rotation of “advanced” classes, but never at the same time.) Business English was something useful for him. Short Stories was a waste of his time.
He showed up late and said he would leave early. (He had to work.) Then something remarkable happened. We read Can-Can by Arturo Vivante. In it, a man regrets setting up a rendezvous with a lover. The story is just a page or two long, but it’s full of rich material. The class talked about the language, the literary devices, and the themes. Then we started debating things, and while I can’t remember the Polish lawyer’s points, I’ll never forget the image of him standing halfway out the door, his arm waving in the air, shouting one last point about infidelity and marriage before he left to go to work… and then reappearing a minute later to make his last last point. He was hooked.
In the end, we had a great class. Every lesson was full of passionate debates built around powerful stories.
I learned how great stories are for motivating the unenthusiastic student.
Now, let’s look at four more uses of stories as well as some good activities to do with stories.
Stories are a great jumping off point for a mixed-level classroom
One of the great uses of stories is to solve the problem of a mixed-level classroom. You start with the story and then let everyone fly as high as they can. The hardest part is finding the right story. You’ll want something that’s full of interesting images and ideas but not too hard to explain. Take 20-30 minutes to help everyone understand the story. Then do activities that work across levels.
Consider using Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken. There’s some hard language in it, but it’s short, so you can explain the ideas to students within 30 minutes. If students really struggle, encourage them to read a translation online.
Once the students have a basic understanding, the sky is the limit. Here are some activities you can use to deepen their understanding. You can do one activity as a class or let each student choose one they’d like to try.
Comprehension Building Activities:
- Read the story to each other out loud, compare/contrast intonation
- Retell the story to each other in their own words
- Illustrate or act out the story
- Write what happened just before or just after the story
- Cut up the story into pieces, then reassemble the pieces from memory
- Circle any new words, then find two synonyms for each new word
After your students have a deeper understanding, consider going further with these critical thinking activities.
Critical Thinking Activities:
- Debate the meaning of ambiguous language/ideas
- Guess why the author made some choices (e.g. why a wood and not a river?)
- Find a story with a similar theme (in any language), compare/contrast the stories
Stories help you address challenging issues
There are any number of important issues we might like to address in the classroom. Issues like racism, sexism, and native speaker bias are important, but we can think more broadly. Consider family issues like disciplining children or an overbearing in-law. Or how about issues around making a career change, dealing with an illness, or breaking bad news?
They’re all hard to bring up. They are also a big part of our students’ lives, and we do them a disservice when we ignore them altogether. Stories let us all live in the challenging area for a minute without being overbearing or too personal. Here are some activities you can try after reading a story featuring a challenging or sensitive subject.
Sensitive Subject Activities
- Identify empowering language. Our students often lack the language they need to stand up for themselves, but they can find it in stories. Have them circle useful language and describe situations they might use it.
- Role-play the issue. It’s not nice to push students to talk about their own challenging issues, but role plays let everyone explore the issues in a detached way.
- Describe how friends and family would react to the story. What would your friends back home think? How about your grandma? Why?
Stories show off the interconnected nature of language
We often think of language in terms of isolated things like definitions, grammar rules, and sounds. Language, however, is as much about the connections between things as the things themselves. For example, a word isn’t just its definition, but also all the words and grammar and ideas we associate with it. From this perspective, stories are a goldmine of connections. They show how the isolated bits add up to something greater than the sum of the parts.
Activities for Seeing Connections in Language
- Find the words that go with other words. Identify some words that are repeated several times in the story. Then have the students list the words that come before and after those keywords.
- Learn the importance of verb tense. Choose a new primary verb tense for the story and have the students list all the things they’d have to change to make it work.
- Tell similar stories. Choose the ten most important words from the story. Then ask the students to imagine other stories they could tell with those same words.
Stories let everyone have some fun!
Finally, sometimes a story is just plain fun. That’s reason enough to share it with your students. Here are a few more fun activities you can do with your students using stories.
Fun Story Activities
- Watch the movie! Graded readers especially are often based on movies. Enjoy the story. Then enjoy the movie.
- Create a talk show with the characters. Imagine the characters are on a talk show. One student can be the host. The other students can be characters from the story.
- Make a soundtrack. Ask each student to find and present a song that matches the story. Then make a playlist the students can keep forever.
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Finding good stories is a challenge. Consider using these resources.
Pearson Graded Readers
A World of Fiction
True Stories
Classic Short Stories
Poetry in Voice
Jeremy Schaar is an English teacher who has bounced around the globe teaching and learning. He has taught in Russia, the United States, and South Korea. He has also developed content for colleges, websites, and textbook publishers. He is passionate about education in general and especially Business English, writing skills, and online learning. Follow Jeremy on Twitter @jeremyschaar
