Personal and creative short-story telling

David Heathfield

Students begin to tell their stories spontaneously, the content is rich and they become involved in each other's life stories

LISTENING

AND REMEMBERING

These activities focus on attentive listening and remembering.

" With our gentle nurturing, students' stories grow and flourish and bring colour to the learning"

• "I tell your story"
• "Problem stories"

TRUTH OR LIE

These activities involve students guessing how much of their partners' stories is true.

FINDING

OUT

• "What's the lie?"
• "Tell a lie"
• "Whose loss?"

To find out what happen s in their partners' stories before they listen.

• "Guess what happened in the end"
• "Personal story questions"

Creativity in the English language classroom

ACT IT OUT

For promoting expressive storytelling

• "Celebration"
• "An act of kindness"

Those storytelling activities boost

students' confidence

as English speakers.

By regularly doing that, students develop:

• confidence
• fluency
• the use of vocabulary
• their ability to communicate creatively

• Students learn a great deal about pronunciation when listening attentively and looking at the face of their storytelling teacher.
• Teachers need to keep the storytelling simple and articulate words clearly, adjust the vocabulary to their students' ability.
• It is important to challenge students.

PERSONAL AND CREATIVE COMMUNICATION

• When storytelling, students are responding to a live and present person and using non-verbal language

As teachers we need to be AWARE of:

• Our voice, posture, the use of facial expressions, gestures and body language.
• The use of voice, the changes of rhythm, pauses

We provide a useful MODEL

The writer in this chapter provides some small group activities for students to speak

• The main thing is that students closely listen to and understand each other.
• If they do not know how to say a word in English, they can use their mother tongue to say that word the first time they tell the story. They can then use the dictionary to find it and tell the story again.

CREATIVE TASKS

We need to encourage students not only to pay attention but also to build on each other's responses and develop as a community of learners.

• Students bring their lifetime of stories with them into the classroom and these stories are our richest resource.
• We simply need to provide activities to develop as co-creative storytellers and story-listeners in English.
• TEACHER as a storyteller MODEL for students.

PERSONAL STORYTELLING

• encourage a free flow of ideas
• value every contribution
• enjoy and recognize different ways of doing a task
• acknowledge different responses
• show interest
• make sure all the group members have an equal share of time and attention

Humans are narrative beings

• We filter the data we are constantly exposed to and make stories to tell our lives.
• As narrative beings, we aspire to be fluent.

'Speaking English better'

=

being able to share personal stories in an engaging way

STORYTELLING

• A deeply creative part of being human.
• We learn about ourselves from the stories we are told and the stories we tell.
• The classroom as a good environment for storytelling.
• Students learn to communicate more creatively in English.

Personal and creative

short-story telling

Telling our stories

Student: Marilina Montenegro