Tag: ESL

National storytelling week

~ Amy Gowers

So this week in the UK is National Storytelling week and in ode to this, I completely scrapped my lesson plan and taught a storytelling class with my CAE Advanced students.

Exam classes are stressful; for the teacher and student alike so they were VERY happy to take a break and just use the English they had.

One of the main problems with storytelling and creative writing is the lack of ideas. Having to think up an entire plot, character arc and language can take the magic out of storytelling. To bypass this problem, I introduced the idea of storytelling step by step. Not until the very last minute did my students realise what they were doing. Removing this pressure to “create” something made them much more receptible.

Step 1 – lead in

I gave the student 15 seconds of silent thinking time to think about these three questions:

1) Do you read stories? What kind/why not?

2) Did you parents read to you or tell you stories when you were young?Why, how did it make you feel?

3) Do you or will you read or tell stories to your child?

Storytelling doesn’t care what language you speak so I encouraged them to think about English and their native languages. Once their time was up, I split them into pairs and they discussed their answers. Encouraging the students to ask their partner further follow up questions helps to encourage spontaneity in their speaking.

Step 2 – ideas generation

I gave the students 4 interesting images (I can send these to you if you would like) and asked them, in their pairs, to discuss each one picture by picture. I asked them to be curious and to question everything they saw.

Was the statue really a statue?

What’s making the grass rise up; is it just a hill or is something underneath?

There were no wrong answers here and every idea was a good idea. They had the freedom to come up with as many far out or sane ideas as they liked.

Step 3 – ideas generation take 2

After each pair had discussed the pictures, I swapped their partner. Now, they had to go through the images again and tell their new partner about their ideas. This helps not only as a further step to help come up with ideas but also to deepen and extend the ideas they had. By asking their partner questions about their ideas, the students were able think about aspects of the picture that they perhaps hadn’t thought of before.

Once finished, they go back to their original partner and discuss anything interesting they learnt from their partner.

Step 4 – vocabulary

First, I asked the students to choose the one image which piqued their interest and inspired them the most. All other images were then put to one side.

Under each picture was an empty table, the students were tasked with filling the table with vocabulary related to the image. They had to think of all word forms: verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs and write them in the table. I, as teacher, withheld the right to veto a word if I thought it was too boring and too simple. This encouraged them to think properly about the image rather then rhyming off what they could see (the dictionary and thesaurus helped).

In true Art Attack style, when the students had exhausted their ideas or had filled their table, I gave them a version I’d filled in earlier. They could take any of my words and add them to their own table or put them around the picture.

Step 5 – introduce the arc

All stories regardless of imagination and creativity need to follow an arc As these students hadn’t seen it before, I introduced them to it in the same way I did last with my other class (come back and read my blog next week to see exactly how I did this). I followed this up by giving them a short story and, in pairs, asking them to highlight the different sections of the story arc in the short story. And as with everything, they also had to justify their reasoning to each other.

Step 6 – building the arc

The students by this point have had lots of input and preparation, it’s time to plan their own story. Going back to the image that inspired them the most, the students had to brainstorm, with their partner, what their story would be. It’s important here to encourage students to think as creatively as possible and remind them to use the vocab they came up with earlier. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel, the hard work’s done! They just have to piece it together.

Step 7 – it’s storytelling time

Everything’s done. They’ve prepped, planned, brainstormed, worked in pairs, helped each other and their story is finished. It’s now time to tell their story. Writing can detract from the creatively of storytelling so I decided that my student would tell their stories not write them. I moved the students around so they were with a different partner and asked them to tell their story. They were allowed to keep their notes with them, this wasn’t a test; it was an opportunity to be, dare I say it again, creative with the language. We spent a few minutes going over what makes a good storyteller (hand gestures, emphasis, excitement, tone of voice etc) and off they went!

I taught this class with a C1 group of adult students but there’s no reason why, with a bit of grading, that this can’t work with all students of any levels! Sometimes it’s nice (and beneficial) to throw out the coursebook and just play with the language. I now have a group of budding storytellers!

Let me know how you get on with yours:)

YL generated materials!

~ Amy Gowers ~ Leave a comment

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a teacher in possession of a YL classroom, must always prepare beforehand. Or is it? Ask any YL teacher where most of their time goes and I’d bet that their answer has something to do with materials prep; cutting, sticking, photocopying, creating or drawing.

Giving kids that much control actually means more work in the classroom; more monitoring, more error correcting and (usually) more behavioural management. BUT after a particularly busy week (what with reports, exams and marking) I decided to risk it and leave the preparing up to my students; my A1 level, 7 – 9 year old students.

Incorporating collaboration, communication and LOTS OF SPEAKING, in pairs, my students made their own speaking and question form revision board games. With such a positive outcome, I thought I’d share it with you guys!

Below is a picture of my board during this lesson. As you read through the steps, use this picture to help make sense of the guide.

Step one

Thinking of question forms can be daunting for students as they encounter so many of them throughout the year. Providing question chunks can help them focus on the most important ones and not rely on simply the age old ‘do you like…’ question. Start by eliciting the most recently learnt question form but leave gaps where the students have the freedom to change and add words. Elicit all the other forms and put them on the board.

Step two

Drilling the questions through the preparation stage is really important. It makes sure that the students are comfortable and confident with the questions. It also helps to go through the gap fill possibilities and remind the students of their options.

Step three

Go through some board game shape options to give the students some creative freedom. Letting the students decide what board game shape they want to use lets them feel in control of their game, in addition to giving them something to discuss with their partner. Give them a piece of paper and give them a few minutes to discuss their options and draw their game.

*NB: It’s important to give the students a few minutes to talk or discuss options after each step.

Step four

It’s time to set the expectations. Tell the students how many questions you expect and in what order you expect them to write the questions. In my classroom, I told the students to go through the list of questions from 1 to 6 and then back through them again until they had 30 questions.

Step five

Now it’s writing time! The students have their board game template, they have their question chunks and they have their ideas. It’s now up to them to write their questions in their pairs on their board game. During this step, it’s the teachers job to keep the students on track, help them with their writing/spelling if necessary and prompt them with gap fill options if they start to run out of ideas by monitoring, monitoring, monitoring.

Step six

And finally! It’s time to play. Get the students to swap their board game and play each others games. All you’ll need is a die per pair and one of the board games. Good luck! 🙂

At first glance, it may look like the students aren’t really learning much in this lesson. However, it’s a great chance for them to practise their turn-taking skills, it gives them a lot of linguistic freedom and space to use their English in their own way and gives them lots of opportunities for speaking and communication.

I hope you find this as useful and as positive as I did. Although I used this lesson as an end of year revision class, it can easily be adapted and used at the start of the year as a way to get the students back into the English swing of things. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the finished products but I’d love to see some of yours! If you do try this out in your classroom, send me a message and let me know how it goes!

Collaborative story writing with YLs

~ Amy Gowers ~ 3 Comments

Storytelling has always been important when introducing reading and new language to children. It helps foster an positive relationship with the language, and between the teacher and students. Story writing can be equally as important but much harder to do in a YL classroom. Encouraging students to access their creativity and create a story which is logical, has the typical beginning, middle and end, and makes sense grammatically can be difficult in a low-level classroom. I had a spare lesson coming up the end of the year with an A1 level age 7 – 9 class and decided to experiment with a collaborative story-writing lesson. Super communicative and super fun, my students loved having so much creative freedom and eventually came up with some really funny stories, so I thought I’d share it 🙂

Step one

Introduce the topic of story writing by having the student read a story. I took a story from the textbook about a horse named Suzy and her friends. The story had pictures next to each paragraph (usually 2 or 3 sentences), I cut them up and in pairs, the students had to read the sentences and match them to the correct picture using vocabulary clues.

Step two

Once the students were finished they had to walk around the classroom, read the story in their books and check to see if all the pairings were correct. If they weren’t correct they were able to to change them.

Step three

I asked the students a selection of questions to elicit the structure of the story. Every time I asked a question, I wrote it on the board for later.

Step four

With the above questions answered about the textbook story, I put the students into 2 groups (4 students in each group). To get them engaged with the idea of writing a story, I told them that the textbook story was boring and rubbish. I said there were no magic, no zombies, no ninjas, no unicorns basically anything that I knew they were interested in. I then instructed them to think of a name and a ‘thing’ (I try to stay away from metalanguage so didn’t use noun). This gave us Janusz the Magic Yoghurt and Amy the Unicorn.

Step five

In their groups and with the names now chosen, the students were tasked with thinking about their own stories in their groups. I told them not to write anything down but to just to answer the questions one by one in their groups. After about 5 – 10 minutes of discussions (where I monitored and asked extra follow up questions if the students were struggling to think of ideas) it was time to write the sentences on the board.

Step six

Writing time! One by one I asked each group the questions working down the list. The students told me what their answer were and one student wrote the sentence on the board. Although only one student wrote the sentence the other students helped their partner by telling them what to write and how to write it, especially spelling. This meant that all the students were repeating the sentences over again, attempting to peer correct and improving each other’s language. Each sentence was written by a different student sin the group.

Step seven

The final product!

Once both stories were on the board, we did some whole class error correction (the above pictures were taken before the corrections) where the students read through the stories once more and corrected any mistakes. The students then copied it down into their notebook.

This was by no means a perfect lesson and I’m sure the next time I do a collaborative writing session with my YLs I’ll do something slightly different, but I’m really happy with what my students produced and how well they worked with each other.

Hopefully you too will find this useful 🙂

NB: Although this lesson was done with YLs, it can be very easily adapted to an adult or teen class as long as their level is equally as low and the topic of the story is relevant and appropriate.