ELTWeekly Newsletter Vol. 3 Issue#96 | August 29, 2011 | ISSN 0975-3036
“A feature that is common both to language teaching and to traditional folk and fairy tales is the repetition of phrases or ‘language chunks’. In the most popular English versions of some traditional tales the exact same phrase is repeated unmodified, e.g. ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down,’ Wolf threatens each of the Three Little Pigs. In other tales a phrase is repeated but amended each time, e.g. ‘Who’s been sitting in my chair?’ ‘Who’s been eating my porridge?’ and ‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’ Goldilocks causes the Three Bears to wonder. Another example of this is Little Red Riding Hood’s exclamations ‘What big eyes/ears/teeth you have, Grandma!’ The telling of these stories can usefully support English language students’ learning of the ‘will’ future form, the Present Perfect Continuous and ‘what+adjective+noun exclamations’ respectively.
Joining in
In many cultures listeners are invited to join in with these kinds of language chunks when being told a story in their mother tongue, so it makes sense for us to invite learners of a second target language to join in. Where the story being told in English is already known to learners in their mother tongue (this may well be the case in many parts of the world regarding the three stories mentioned above) this knowledge will provide additional support when joining in with the teacher and retelling the story partly or wholly in English”.
Read the complete article online at http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/teaching-tale-language-memory