[ELTWeekly Volume 11, Issue 2 | February 28, 2019 | ISSN 0975-3036]
OUP’s Gareth Davies has published an interesting article on using storytelling to improve listening skills.
Davies says, “I’ve been telling stories with students for about three years but at the end of 2018, I spent three months teaching young adults in Japan and decided to do a little experiment. At least once a week I told them a story. Sometimes I did nothing with it, just told it at the beginning or the end of the lesson and moved on. Sometimes we briefly discussed the story and then moved on. Sometimes I built a lesson around the story. I told the story using actions, pictures and sounds if needed to help with the meaning but still in an adult way. The students enjoyed the stories, and they produced some really excellent work based on them. When I asked them at the end of the course if they could remember the stories, they listed them and took pleasure in retelling them to each other.
Here is some of the feedback that I’ve been receiving from students:
- ‘Thanks to the storytelling lessons, I got skills for listening, imagination and retelling.’
- ‘This definitely helped our listening skills…. we could communicate with each other and try to express our thoughts, ideas, and so on.’
- ‘Those stories let me imagine the view, place, person and a lot of other stuff”.
Developing listening skills with storytelling | Gareth Davies