I lived in South Africa for many years.  I had a good job there with, USIS, the United States Information Service.   Then I came to Italy, to Rome.

In South Africa I had a parrot.  You can say that it was my best friend.  I don’t have a family, only my parrot.  I talked to him every day and he talked to me.  He could say a lot of words and phrases.   Very often they were really sensible.   He waited for me to come home and always said, “Hello.  How are you?”  When I came through the door. And he never said, ‘Good evening!’ in the morning.

Then I got a new job in Rome.  I arrived in Rome with the parrot and the customs officer took the parrot.  He said, “This parrot has to stay in quarantine for three months.”

Anyway, I was very unhappy.  I arrived in a new country and started a new home without my parrot.  At last, the three months were over and I went to collect my parrot.  The man was nervous so I thought my parrot was sick or even, dead.  I got really upset.

I said, ‘You are not making eye contact with me!  You are hiding something from me about my parrot.  What is it?’

‘Madame, your parrot is healthy.’

‘Then why don’t you look me in the eye? What is wrong with my parrot?’

‘Madame, your parrot…’

‘Yes?’

‘Your parrot…Well, you see we don’t have a separate section for parrots, nor even … any cages. So, Madame, your parrot has been living in a kennel… with…dogs.’

‘And?’

‘And, Madame, it… no longer talks… but barks like a dog.’

‘Barks?’

‘Madame, it barks… whines, whimpers and growls like a dog.  It is a very considerable linguist, if I may say so.’  He looked sideways at me, expressing very reasonable fear that I might do him an injury.

Anyway, I took the parrot home and sure enough, it was an audial dog albeit a visual parrot.

The stress in my new job was as much as I could take and this was too much.  In these circumstances there is one thing a New Yorker can do, find a shrink.

I looked up in the yellow pages for a pet psychiatrist and found one.  This was Rome.  New York is full of them.

So we went along. We didn’t each have to lie on our own sofa.  Sorry to disappoint you.

Basically, the dude said, ‘Go home.  Be relaxed with him.  Give him time to get used to you.  Give him freedom.  Talk to him.  He needs to be given respect, personal choice, and so on.  He’s a clever guy.’

I took him home, whining in the car. I tried to take it easy with him…talked to him…gave him the freedom of the whole apartment.

One day, I went out and left the window open.  When I came back he’d gone.

After a few days I began advertising in several newspapers in Rome. ‘If anyone sees or hears a barking parrot, please let me know.’  There have been occasional reports of a barking parrot hanging out with a pack of stray dogs in Parco di Villa Glori,  I went a couple of times but heard and saw nothing.

Then I got an idea, ‘I rang up the dog quarantine stables for Rome and asked for the man that I dealt with originally.

‘Oh, yes, Signora!  I am glad you have phoned.  Yes, he’s back here.  He seems to have made close friends with an unclaimed mongrel.  We wondered if you would like to come and collect him…and perhaps you would consider taking the bitch which he seems so attached to, quite literally, at times.’

‘Well, I will summarise the situation in my life now, I have got the, not my, parrot back and his new partner and I find myself very much classificed as the junior wife in the relationship. He has carried on barking and all that pouch lingo but does speak to me occasionally like, ‘I’m hungry.’

‘So am I!’  I tell him.

Now I go to the shrink by myself.

.

Food makes our bodies. Stories make our minds. Stories are central to society not a mere entertainment extra…and this applies to adults as well as children. Stories are needed by everyone and are full of words…obviously a central path for LT.

Stories are:

Descriptions of events containing desires, difficulties and struggles.
Non-fiction: storying of childhood experience; family history, community, school, business, state, church.
Fiction: traditional stories, myths, legends, literature
Verbal and non-verbal story maps: we are guided in our daily experience by the values, perceptions and behaviours put in our minds through stories but also through the way of life modelled for us in their actions by everybody we are in contact with. ‘The iron lady’ is part of the story world…
Bits of stories: ‘fat cat’, ‘iron lady’, contain character and are part of the storyworld…and relevant to language teaching.

Benefits of stories in Language Teaching are:

Bonding with you and other students.
Experiencing language (involving emotional intelligence) rather than only studying it.
All skills.
Introduction and recycling of vocabulary, grammar, function, syntax.
Springboard to other activities.

Telling a story well:
Clarity
Readers and listeners must be able to understand the story.
Engaging
Desire and problem…with struggle and resolution.
Not a summary but descriptions of particular situations, people, moments, etc.
Richness of person, place, action through detail: see, hear, taste, touch, smell and including, action, things said, thought and felt.
Spend that extra moment on detail: how somebody walks, how they show their nerves, their peculiar personal habits. Heighten, emphasise, sustain and repeat a point…go beyond the generalities of most exchanges.
Through engaging content but also through form:
In writing: precision, alliteration, rhythm, formality/informality, metaphor and simile/fresh images rather than hackneyed images…
In speaking: precision, forms as in writing, voice, body, dramatic techniques. But speaking is informal, not literary, with all the hesitancy and repetition of normal speech.

Starting points for life experience stories:
Above all story sharing must NOT be experienced as language practice and testing! Story sharing must be experienced as an important exchange of experience and ideas between people. Note language errors for later practice…only give language support in order to sustain meaning and engagement of the listeners.
A story must be of a particular incident or series of incidents and not a summary.
Use random cues to open memory’s door: a scar, a number, an object, a first line eg I remember…I can see…
Brainstorm in bubbles or brainstorm in continuous writing.
Non-fiction
Any situation in life in which there is a desire and a problem…followed by struggle and resolution…or aspects of these things….

News
History
Family stories about relatives
An important person for you
Earliest memory
Accident
Crime
Coincidence
Scary moment
Silly/cheeky behaviour
Dilemma
An incident which changed your life

Fiction stories

Traditional stories
Myths
Legends
Urban legends
Literature
Starting first lines….

Further reading

Andrew Wright. Storytelling with Children (second edition). Oxford University Press
Andrew Wright. Creating Stories with Children. Oxford University Press
Andrew Wright and David A Hill. Writing Stories. Helbling Languages.
Appendix of examples from my life
Non-fiction:
childhood experience: reading David Copperfield when I was eight
family history: Gt, gt, gt grandfather Daniel Farnsworth
important people for me: art master ambiguous teaching
community history: Captain Oates
business: The story of Ford
church: Good Samaritan
science: discovery of penicillin
personal daily experience: Kormi the cat being shot
Contemporary local news: woman who lost a barking parrot
Contemporary international news: man who cut off his own arm
Fiction:
traditional stories: Little Red Riding Hood
teaching stories: fables
myths: Theseus
legends: giant husband and giant wife in Yorkshire
literature: Roald Dahl

Andrew Wright

My comment

23 teachers is far too few on which to base any general assertions about the way teachers use stories. However, I found the feedback was most interesting in two ways:
1 the number of teachers using personal anecdotes instead of or as well as traditional stories.
2 the rich variety of comments about individual perceptions of usefulness or individual ways of using stories.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Summary
Total responses: 23
Different countries: 13
Ages and levels: all ages and levels
Frequency: only one said occasionally or never and this is not surprising
Tell or read: both…some do not tell and some do not read
Types of story: whole range of types and sources but most striking is the number of teachers who tell their own personal anecdotes.
Benefits: Striking the number of teachers who do not stress grammar as the benefit…or go further and do not use stories related grammar at all.
Here are four quotations reduced by me to note form:
Sandie: jumping, whooping, nodding, laughing, sitting in emphatic silence, repeating because they like the sound, by relating to experience in their own lives, by relating it to another story they have heard…
Listening…vocab…interest and goodwill
Alison: goodwill, good for self esteem re reading and understanding an English book,
Michele: I like her compromise…’I try not to focus on grammar. They get enough of that in theirr general English lessons but it is important to highlight things that they may have learned.
Other comments
These proved to be the most interesting part of the survey…in the notes below I have summarised and in note form much longer entries.
Stefka: Provoke thinking..develop vocab…devel expression…improve understanding…promotes writing stories on science subjects
Dindy: imaginations fired…safe in stories…a need for language…teachers may not be good tellers but must have a go…sts must interact…just reading aloud is boring..
Ellen: love them…personal anecdotes lead to the sts telling their own…very similar to use of stories in everyday life…like to find out about their teachers…helps rapport…for adults use Brit Council Brit Lit…adults enjoy being read to…stopping every so often to ask what the listeners see or imagine or predict what will happen next..
Sandie: enrich our LT…quality reasons for using the language…only use stories with visual support…normally pic story book…stories are not just words…stories can be taken out of class and shared…
Jasna: writing stories is equally important
Barbara: like them…but difficult to understand at first…keep the stories short and simple…introd some vocab before the story…use pictures…tell the story more than once… check understanding by re telling using key words…discuss underlying meanings…worksheet to check understanding but also to promote creative response eg alternative ending..
Jan: Personal anecdotes make a lesson more relevant…my anecdotes offer a model for the sts to tell their stories…sts find they don’t need so much grammar to tell stories effectively…when I tell trad stories eg stone cutter I keep stopping so they can make a drawing…these drawings become a storyboard…can add thinks and speech bubbles…and alternative ending
Elbie: sts can be affected by the theme in the story…they can gain and learn by this…instigate thinking… Elbie emphasises what a non language teacher would emphasise…
Roisin: Stories are useful at any age and any level…age and level affect the type of story and what the story is used for…eg First Cert sts personal anecdotes listening practice and rapport…5year olds short repetitive stories…play out themselves…role plays..
Rita: Collecting narratives…personal stories from students about their learning histories..read aloud…discuss similarities and differences…gives them insights into their beliefs, values and formative experiences…
Pedro: Stories are a natural part of being a child.
Alison Watson: The value of stories is that they are memorable. Personal anecdotes for adults because like real life and can retell to others…fairy stories for children…repeating them…language and understanding grows..retain, recycle, reproduce the lang as well as the content.
Mercedes Viola Deambrosis: People…interested..involved..pay attention to topics…enriches exposure to language…
Johanthan…anecdotes break down student teacher and student student barriers…opens up discussions regarding culture and story telling
Kate: Personal stories…rapport…sense of belonging…trusting them with personal experience.. one example based on a necklace bought in Mexico…told story and it involved…health, safety..jobs…professions…and much more.
Belle Leung: captures fidgeting childrens attention, arouses interest in learning difficult language…good lead in to tedious grammar lesson.
Natercia: chdn like them and are used to listening to stories in the MT….introducing and recycling vocabulary…
Alison: as I read my stories from books I have difficulty in finding books with suitable sophistication level related to the limited language level of my children.
Elka: Stories help me teach tings without explicitly focussing on them and my students like that….introduce past tense forms before studying them..and stories for provoking speaking and writing…makes us want to share something…helps the students to find me ‘cool’.
Michele: must be simple and interesting stories or otherwise too much translation and pre teaching of vocabulary which slows things down too much.
One of the most successful for my 8 year olds …made up a power point talk about a holiday together with lots of photos…the kids were very engaged.
Its very difficult to get the level/type of the story right.
Si Lewis: Storytelling can bring many aspects to the class. It can be the focus of language development or the base from which communicative activities can be launched.

The main thing is we are both dedicated to trying to share stories and ideas related to teaching English as a foreign language and we are not looking for any payment for this… And we want to keep on adding things…I have got at least another 30 or 40 stories I want to write and many more articles. So keep coming and please tell your friends.It is our small offering to the world to help to balance out all the misery and horror brought by some people on other people.

In recent days Dennis and I have added quite a few more stories.

Click on Stories and then have a look under Teaching Stories.

Also have a look under Fiction…we have put in my first fiction story on the site, Harold and Huwi. Harold and Huwi was first broadcast on West German Televison (WDR). However, the text given here is a transciption of the way I tell the story to children…this is not literary written text!

I feel very proud of the teaching stories! I hope you don’t mind my saying so! They are a significant re-write of Aesops fables and are very, very much written down versions of oral telling to childen with little English…everyday phrases, a lot of repetition and a huge invitation to act them out and to mime meaning.

I do hope you like them. Tell me if you do. Dennis and I need a pat on the back.

Andrew

PS I send my stories to Dennis in WORD and he puts them into NOTEPAD and then puts them on the site and then I edit them. Dennis is better at these things than me…in another league!

My motivation in offering ‘my life’s work’ in this way is to make a small contribution to the world of sharing rather than greedy grabbing. If sharing also leads to interesting and valuable contacts for me that is fine but it is not my first motive.

*Please note that I have included in a few of my articles a few very short examples from the work of other people. I have acknowledged my sources when I know them. Where I do not have the source I have marked the text accordingly and would welcome information from or about the copyright holders.