Tell To Teach
As we said before, sometimes PQA will lead naturally to a funny, spontaneous story. However, when this questioning gets worn out without a story, it will be time to start a class story.
Carol Gaab calls this section “Story-asking” instead of Storytelling, and makes the following remarks:
“Unlike traditional storytelling in which students passively listen to the storyteller, story-asking engages students by involving them in the story creation process and giving them a sense of ownership in the story. Asking questions elicits sustained enriching brain activity and it also allows the teacher to achieve more repetitions than simple storytelling affords. In a nutshell, story-asking provides a natural platform for context and an endless stream of camouflaged repetitions.”21
Start building up a story by making an initial statement and then asking questions to fill in the details of the character, the problem, etc., according to the two or three initial structures that you taught in the beginning. The students will feel that they develop the story with you. This story might be quite different from your initial idea, or when you teach it to different classes, and that is the beauty in the flexibility and freedom of storytelling. Precisely because it is personalized for the students and by the students of a particular class, it will acquire their own mood. By asking four or more questions for each statement you will maximize the repetitions. It is advisable to use actors and simple props, when possible.
Some recommendations to make up a story are: to have a character, have a problem, go to location A and not get it solved, then go to location B and not get it solved either, until he/she arrives at location C and the solution is found.
The choice of characters is up to the teacher. We usually have either the students themselves or else someone they all know. Sometimes I use a student as an actor and we make up a new name for him or her. The teacher need to talk to the actors too. Introducing dialogue among the actors or between an actor and the teacher gives an opportunity to introduce the use of the 1st and 2nd person’s point of view. As we said before, we do not encourage the use of media, so we avoid using media characters or celebrities names, especially in the early grades. Some can be used in the High School at the teacher’s discretion.
There are many techniques to spice-up this step of TPRS. One of them is to use simple props to simulate the characters, such as a moustache, or a hat, or a stuffed animal in the lower grades. For further reading on how to enhance your technique, I highly recommend Ben Slavic’s books (see the bibliography), as well as the many resources available online. The art of storytelling is a critical step and deserves a good deal of practice and understanding to really direct the class into a healthy, repetitive yet compelling story. Also, there is so much to learn on the websites of several wonderful teachers of TPRS. For more details, I have added these links at the end of this section.
Once you feel you have a good piece of the mini-story, you can retell the story to the class, maximizing the repetitions. You can make mistakes to encourage them to pay attention and correct you. You can add more details, you can add interesting questions.
When the story has been completed, you can have the students retell the story. This can be done either by one or several students. This is a good opportunity for an informal assessment.
Now that you have a story and the class knows it pretty well, you can also revisit the story from a different perspective, meaning that instead of using only the 3rd person singular, you can start practicing retelling it from the 3rd person plural by adding another character to the main one, or the 1st person singular by adding a dialogue format or telling the students, “You are now the main character. Tell us the story from your point of view”, etc.
This is a very important step, since this is one of the times when we will be introducing the grammar “subtleties” to the students, without calling it a direct grammar instruction. This is in accordance with Steiner’s recommendations of not making any demands on conceptual understanding before puberty... "one should use undefined, direct impression or the pictorial description, which can grow into full understanding when the child is older.”22
The way we make clear the grammar points we want to develop, like different verb endings, the change in gender, etc. is by writing them on the blackboard and pointing them out in context, as we are speaking, and explaining it in less than 15 seconds.
For example:
If I am teaching the structure “él come” (he eats), when I add a second character (his brother and he...) I would add the ending “n” with a different color on the blackboard and say something like: “When I add the “n” to come, it becomes comen and it means they eat. The “n” makes it they.”
The next time I say it I will repeat the explanation. Maybe by the third time, or the next day, I will ask: “What does the ending “n” stand for?” Later on, meaning a couple of months later, I will bring to the class a chart with the typical verb endings in the present tense, or maybe just the ones we are starting to work on, to point at it and start making them aware of it. By the end of the school year, or progressively during the year, we can have a “Grammar Review” and they will already know it, because they heard it and practiced the different forms throughout the year. They can write this piece in their books. In this way they can understand it and master it from within, not only by memorizing and editing every time they want to speak, but because they have lived it, they have seen it, and they have heard how it sounds correctly.
21 Carol Gaab, www.tprstorytelling.com