Once students are familiar with the past tense or even once they are able to speak in connected sentences, storytelling becomes an integral part of learning English. When people speak, we generally don’t speak in dialogues; you don’t ask your friend a question, then he replies and asks you a question, you reply then ask him a question and so forth. Usually, we tell each other stories. This can simply be what you did yesterday, how your last holiday went, what you’re going to do next weekend etc. This is why storytelling is so vital to learning a language and often under-appreciated by so many teachers.
But how do you get students to speak and tell each other stories, to use their imagination and to use every aspect of English they’ve learnt to create intricate and interesting tales?
The first thing to do is to provide students with a backdrop. If you just throw students into the deep water and tell them to write, think or tell a story; they will drown in the struggle to create the background for a story and will henceforth struggle to get their thoughts out into words.
You can prevent this by providing them with a foundation by either creating a story chart as a class, or you can use an already existing story chart from a movie, cartoon, book, or comic book etc. Let´s say we use the first Indiana Jones film as an example to create a story chart; this is how it would look like:
Characters (who): Indiana Jones, his girlfriend, his friend, bad soldiers.
Setting (where): Egypt – a desert.
Time (when): 50 years ago.
Problem (what): Indiana wants to find the arc before the soldiers find it.
Now you have your characters, setting, time and dilemma. Now the students have the background to be able to begin creating a story from, which is much easier for them than starting from scratch. Alternatively, you can create your own story chart from scratch. The key point to understand here is to never dive into making a story with your students before you have created a clear story chart.
At this point, as a teacher, you must use everything you have at your disposal. Like a formula one car: it is equipped with a powerful engine; an aerodynamic carbon-fibre framework; a state of the art computer system and top range tires. But simply having all these amazing aspects is not enough; the true art is to be able to successfully utilize everything available to the driver during the race in order to win.
This is not so different when teaching: you have games, activities, PowerPoints, films, music, cards, books, pictures, comic books and so much more in your arsenal. However, when you are getting students to tell stories, you must successfully utilize all these teaching weapons in order to get students speaking and writing creatively and confidently.
Below are a few games and activities that work really well for storytelling.
New from Old
Students replace words within an already written story to make a new story. Students can change the people, the actions or the settings.
E.g. Mr Alex went swimming in the ocean but suddenly saw something that scared him.
A student can change this sentence to something like: An elephant went swimming in a public swimming pool but suddenly saw something that excited him.
Get each student to read a sentence one by one, and each student must change at least one word in the story. Have an electronic copy of the story on the whiteboard for the students to read from and change it as the students change the words. In the end, read the new story with the class. This is guaranteed to generate laughter in the classroom.
Replaceable Parts
Get a student to lie on the ground and then draw an outline of their body on the floor so that you are left with a body outline on the classroom floor. Then give students three separate pieces of paper in which they must write the beginning of a story, the middle and the end (for lower levels, the students can write one or two sentences for each part of the story). Afterwards, place all the pieces of paper with the beginnings of the students’ stories at the feet section of the body outline, all the middle parts in the middle of the body and all the pieces of paper with the ends of the stories at the head of the body. Students then come one by one and choose a piece of paper from each section and read it aloud. By mixing parts of different stories up, the outcome is usually quite hilarious and it’s a good way to practice writing, reading, speaking, listening and storytelling.
Verb Story
Divide the class into two or three teams and get each team to write 5 – 10 verbs. The teams then pass their list of verbs to the other team. The teams must then use their new list of verbs to write a short story incorporating all the verbs (in the appropriate tense) into their story. The team with the most interesting story wins – however they must have used every verb on their list in their story.
Object Story
Fill a bag with random objects. Students sit in a circle. One student starts with the bag, takes out one of the objects and must create a sentence that could be developed into a story; the object they have taken out must be mentioned in their sentence. That student passes the bag to the next student who also picks out a random object and then must continue the story with one or two sentences which must also mention their object. Keep going until the bag is empty and there are no more objects left.
Verb Cards Story
Students sit in a circle and each holds four to ten pieces of paper with a verb written on each one. The students, one by one, create a sentence that fits within the story being told. Each time they use one of the verbs on their pieces of paper in a sentence, they can discard that piece of paper. The winner is the first player to have no more pieces of paper.
One Word Stories
Students sit in a circle and go one by one around the class, each saying one word that enables a story to be told. If a student says a word that finishes the story or says a word that clearly doesn’t make sense or doesn´t fit in with the story, that student loses a point. Once the story has gone around the circle two or three times, you can then let the students finish the story.
One Sentence Stories
Students sit in a circle and go one by one around the class, each saying one sentence that enables a story to be told. If a student creates a sentence that finishes the story or says a sentence that clearly doesn’t make sense or fits in with the story, that student loses a point. Once the story has gone around the circle two or three times, you can then let the students finish the story.
Comic Book
Prepare enough photocopies of a page from a comic book for every student. Also, prepare another photocopy of the comic book page for every student, however this time, make sure that there is no writing on the page, this means that all the speech bubbles and descriptions should be erased.
There are two ways to play this: Either, You can first allow the students to read the original page of the comic book to get an idea of what is happening and then hand out the erased version. You then set the students the task of filling the blank speech bubbles in, but with their own story. Or, you can give the students the erased version first, let them fill it in with their own stories and then hand them the original copy to compare their stories. I prefer the second version as it allows students to think more creatively and for themselves.
Storyboard
Present the class with a short storyboard of 6 – 10 pictures. They can be snapshots from a film, cartoon, comic book etc. Then set the class the challenge to elicit the story from those pictures by writing a sentence or two about each picture.
So…But
The class sits in a circle and the teacher begins by saying the first sentence of a story, the teacher ends the sentence by exaggerating the word ‘so…’. The next student says another sentence that continues the story, but they must start the sentence with an exaggerated ‘so…’, and they must finish their sentence with an exaggerated ‘but…’. The next student says a sentence that continues the story, however, they will start the sentence with an exaggerated ‘but…’, and end their sentence with an exaggerated ‘so…’.
Continue the activity until it comes to a natural end or after a period of time (no more than five-ten minutes) you can tell the next student to create a sentence that finishes the story.
It should resemble something along the lines of:
Teacher: A dragon was flying in the air when he saw another dragon so….
Student 1: so he wanted to say hi, but…
Student 3: but the other dragon was very angry and wanted to eat him so….
Student 4: so the dragon flew down to the ground but…
When Suddenly
This game is played in the exact same way as the previous game ‘So…but’. The only difference is that instead of students saying ‘so’ and ‘but’, replace these two words with ‘when suddenly’ i.e.
Teacher: A dragon was flying in the air when he saw another dragon when suddenly….
Student 1: when suddenly the dragon flew towards him, when suddenly…
Student 3: when suddenly the other dragon was very angry and wanted to eat him when suddenly….
Student 4: when suddenly the dragon flew down to the ground when suddenly…
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Stories are the oldest form of communication between humans. Before the printing press, films and the internet developed; our ancestors had to think creatively how to tell stories other than by the word of mouth.
Our ancient civilizations told stories using paintings, tattoos, cave art, sarcophaguses, stone carvings, writing on leaves, sheepskin, smoke, dancing, music, singing, papyrus and much more. Like our ancestors, when practising storytelling with your students, you have to be imaginative and create exciting new methods for getting students to tell stories to each other – as your ancient ancestors did. At this point, you have progressed from being a teacher and an entertainer – you are also now an anthropologist!
