Storytelling creates a good learning environment and provides valuable input. Thanks to stories, children incorporate the foreing language instead of learning it.
Stories are effective because they are beliavable, rememberable and entertaining (Rossister). They make information more rememberable because they involve us in the actions of the characters.
Stories also help learners to incorporate cultural values different from theirs, help their memory and develop the ability to predict. Telling stories also gives the learner the opportunity to speak the foreign languate and become more confident in the ability to express themselves.
The stories are specially helpful if they are predictable or familiar to the children and contain a proportion of previously learned vocabulary.
Making use of formulas and patterns that are predictable is what makes stories a good learning tool. These repeated elements provide langauge that the children can use later. The pattern of predictability + surprise, or repetition + change creates a natural support for language learning.
Children will remember the story and the words and structures that are repeated, which also encourages the children to participate, as they know what comes next.
What makes a story memorable is actually the way it is told. If the right techniques are used, a story should captivate the audience.
Some tips to retelling the plot are:
- Remembering the key events
- Tell yourself the story in your own words (so in case you forget something, you can always come up with something)
- Create your own version of the story
- Retell it numerous times
In order to give a great performance and captivate your audience, you should remember to:
- Vary the volume, tempo and pitch.
- Exaggerate expressions
- Let your body speak
- Have a clear focus and concentrate
- Mantain eye contact with the audience
- Create a charismatic presence (the audience must believe in you)
- Use exsaggerated and differente character voices
- Be dynamic
- Use a good pace
- Use silence and pauses for dramatic effect
Remember that the language children learn in class is a tool to shape their thoughts and feelings. Stories can be a link between the classroom and beyond, they provide a common trhead that can help unite cultures and provide a bridge across the cultural gap.
This way, even though the stories we tell should be short and easy to understand, it is important not to reproduce some harmful stereotypes that have been present in storytelling from old times, such as the princess who needs to be rescued and can't do anything by herself or the hero who needs to use violence to solve his problems.
