Ana's Blog

Storytelling is one of the most enjoyable and effective techniques to teach languages to young children. When you read or tell stories to children you immerse them in rich language in context, which in turn leads to higher levels of sophistication in speech and literacy. Since this is true for both the first and the second language, it makes sense to introduce children to the best possible language experience from the very moment they start learning a language!

 

My interest in storytelling began almost ten years ago when I attended a workshop for early childhood educators at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) conference. I immediately understood the great potential that storytelling held for teaching world languages, but I had first to deal with a great obstacle: my Spanish students would not understand anything if I presented stories the way I saw that day. Therefore, I would have to come up with a different approach. In addition, I wanted to engage the help of the parents in my classes to continue the learning at home, and this meant that the stories would have to be easy and appealing enough for adults as well.

 

The first thing I did was to choose the type of story that I was going to use. I decided to go with traditional stories known all over the world. I grew up with these stories and so did generations of people here in the US and in other countries (most of these stories are over two hundred years old). I figured that the familiarity would be essential in creating an instant connection to the language.

 

Secondly, I tackled the structure of the stories. Language learners do better when they develop conversational skills alongside literacy skills—imagine how it is for a young child to be engaged in reading or writing activities when he can’t even talk to the kid sitting next to him! Therefore, I decided to shorten the narration and make it highly descriptive and include lots of action and conversations among the characters. The stories started to look like theater scripts, except that they included some narration as well—I believe that the balance between narration and dialogue makes the stories more effective as language learning tools.

The third step I took was to personalize the stories to suit my style of teaching. After researching different versions of the stories (hundreds of hours spent at the local library), I removed parts that I thought were not essential or that I didn’t like (some were really spooky or inappropriate!), re-wrote other parts, and introduced lots of humor and fun twists. This made the stories less predictable and much more engaging. One of the most important elements of education is motivation, and I wanted my students to have a great time in my classes.

I’m describing this as a sequence of steps, but in reality I was trying and testing everything in my classes and changing things as I went along.The first story that I wrote was The Three Little Pigs (actually, the story within the story that you can read in the e-storybook available in my website). My students had a blast with it, but it was very short. I then decided to extend the stories so that I could work on different topics. In order to do so, I begun to think in terms of scenes—each scene to be developed during a period of time. The stories became more theatrical, and I would act them out using wigs, masks and all sorts of props. This made the experience even more fun and engaging for my students--you can use the stories the same way.

 

Storytelling is one of the most enjoyable and effective techniques to teach languages to young children. When you read or tell stories to children you immerse them in rich language in context, which in turn leads to higher levels of sophistication in speech and literacy. Since this is true for both the first and the second language, it makes sense to introduce children to the best possible language experience from the very moment they start learning a language!

 

My interest in storytelling began almost ten years ago when I attended a workshop for early childhood educators at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) conference. I immediately understood the great potential that storytelling held for teaching world languages, but I had first to deal with a great obstacle: my Spanish students would not understand anything if I presented stories the way I saw that day. Therefore, I would have to come up with a different approach. In addition, I wanted to engage the help of the parents in my classes to continue the learning at home, and this meant that the stories would have to be easy and appealing enough for adults as well.

 

The first thing I did was to choose the type of story that I was going to use. I decided to go with traditional stories known all over the world. I grew up with these stories and so did generations of people here in the US and in other countries (most of these stories are over two hundred years old). I figured that the familiarity would be essential in creating an instant connection to the language.

 

Secondly, I tackled the structure of the stories. Language learners do better when they develop conversational skills alongside literacy skills—imagine how it is for a young child to be engaged in reading or writing activities when he can’t even talk to the kid sitting next to him! Therefore, I decided to shorten the narration and make it highly descriptive and include lots of action and conversations among the characters. The stories started to look like theater scripts, except that they included some narration as well—I believe that the balance between narration and dialogue makes the stories more effective as language learning tools.

The third step I took was to personalize the stories to suit my style of teaching. After researching different versions of the stories (hundreds of hours spent at the local library), I removed parts that I thought were not essential or that I didn’t like (some were really spooky or inappropriate!), re-wrote other parts, and introduced lots of humor and fun twists. This made the stories less predictable and much more engaging. One of the most important elements of education is motivation, and I wanted my students to have a great time in my classes.

I’m describing this as a sequence of steps, but in reality I was trying and testing everything in my classes and changing things as I went along.The first story that I wrote was The Three Little Pigs (actually, the story within the story that you can read in the e-storybook available in my website). My students had a blast with it, but it was very short. I then decided to extend the stories so that I could work on different topics. In order to do so, I begun to think in terms of scenes—each scene to be developed during a period of time. The stories became more theatrical, and I would act them out using wigs, masks and all sorts of props. This made the experience even more fun and engaging for my students--you can use the stories the same way.