Have you run out of ideas for your lessons with teens? Look through your photo album! Find yourself as a teenager – I am sure you have something to surprise your students with! ))) During the webinar on Interactive Storytelling we got back in time to the 90th through the story of one photograph. This story was full of the realia of the bygone world: music, everyday objects, historical events and people. This story was full of love and unexpected twists of life.
How to use stories with teenagers and why should they be interactive? Which instruments and techniques can be used to “hook” a modern teenager? Who should be a storyteller?
Storytelling emerged at the same time as language did. Telling and listening to stories are natural inborn human skills. And we should exploit them. “Our Brain is “wired for story”, said Jeremy Harmer in his book “Story-based language learning” (Helbling, 2018:11).
– They prefer to be active participants rather than listen passively
– They are used to taking their attention from one thing to another quickly and frequently, as if they follow the online text with some active links in it.
– They are used to fast information exchange and technologies in their life.
If we combine the inborn human love for storytelling and the reality of the modern teenagers, we will teach great lessons! By involving your teenagers in the process of telling a story, by setting communicative tasks, you make your students active participants of the story, and the story becomes interactive. There are a lot of effective techniques which help teachers to engage teenagers in storytelling.
1) Use music
Find a back-up track. Set the task that the students take part in a contest of scriptwriters. All they have is the film soundtrack. Their task is to invent the details of the film. You can scaffold this activity by some questions: Who are the main characters? Where does the action take place? When? Genre? Main event?
Music activates imagination, helps to develop creative thinking, and team work exploits cooperative intelligence for creating amazing stories.
2) Use short funny stories
Choose a short funny story. Write some words or phrases from this story on the white board. Give the task to make a story using all of the items from the board. After sharing their stories, students read the original. Very often it turns out that the students’ stories are even more interesting.
3) Use video
Find a short video on the Internet. There are a lot of 1-2 minute videos on YouTube which have some deep meaning or an unexpected twist at the end. Demonstrate the video without the sound and the ending. The task is obvious: to dub the video and predict the end. After presenting their ideas, students watch the original video.
4) Use unexpected perspective
This task belongs to Jill Hadfield: students choose an object in the classroom or in their room if working online. Not telling what they are, the students describe their day as if they are this object. For example:
My day so far: I lay on the desk, wrote a love letter, drew a picture, scribbled on the wall, ran out of ink, ended up in the wastepaper basket (a pen).
Students read their short texts and try to guess what they are.
Interactive storytelling increases intrinsic motivation to learning English. Stories do not mean only reading or listening. A story engages “a whole person”: their thoughts, dreams, ideas, experience and emotions. Storytelling helps to show their potential to those students, who are considered to be “weaker” in terms of language. Quite often the teenagers who have problems with accuracy have vivid imagination and easily generate ideas.
It should be reminded that to use interactive storytelling effectively, you should know the teaching essentials. You should understand the focus of your lesson and your main aim because they determine the staging of your lesson. If your aim is to develop skills (receptive: reading or listening, or productive: speaking and writing), you will have such stages as the pre-skill stage to prepare your students, the skill-stage to practice the chosen skill, and the post-skill stage to personalize the material of the lesson, to discuss it or give feedback.
If the aim of your lesson is to use the text of the story for teaching some grammar or lexis, then the plan will be different. First, you will give a comprehension task and work with the text and ideas, after that you will help your students to notice your target language in the text of the story. During the presentation stage you will deal with the meaning, form and pronunciation of the target language, followed by some practice activities.
Understanding of the teaching process (here you need Young Learners Course) ensures effectiveness of every creative approach to teaching English, including interactive storytelling.
To get a recording of the webinar or some information about the course Young Learners Course, please, write to us on the social network.