“STORIES are the building blocks of knowledge, the foundation of memory and learning.

”
National Storytelling Association

ABSTRACT

This research project presents an experiment carried out in an Argentinean

private school that aims to investigate and evaluate the use of traditional short-stories as
a meaningful context for presenting a new linguistic exponent. By adopting a control
group design and by administering a discrete point examination to both the
experimental and control groups, we intend to test the following hypothesis:
When students are introduced to a new grammatical item via stories, they
produce highly accurate written texts on their own.
The results of the tests will be analysed quantitatively by means of bar charts. As
an anticipated outcome, the analysis of the data might indicate that the experimental
group will be more accurate in the test than the control group. We might also prove that,
by using a story as a context for introducing the simple past tense, the students may
profit from this meaningful context, and therefore, not only perform better in the exam
but also have a rich experience in the target language.

INTRODUCTION

The present research design will set out to analyse and evaluate the use of
traditional short-stories in the ELT classroom. Our main concern has to do with the
implementation of authentic short-stories in the foreign language lessons as a
memorable as well as meaningful context to present new linguistic exponents.
Our inquiry has resulted from the fact that, as future teachers of English, we find
that sometimes teaching grammar to children is a challenge as well as a difficulty when
the materials available such as textbooks do not reflect the students’ interests. In
addition, having experienced this problem during our teaching practice, we believe that
it would be a good idea to try out other types of materials such as traditional short-
stories in the EFL classroom in order to enhance learners’ motivation while emphasizing
certain fundamental language points in a meaningful context.

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 This study is based on some notions taken from: “Storytelling with Children”
(Wright Andrew, 1995), “Language and Literature Teaching: From Practice to
Principle” (Brumfit Christopher, 1985), “Once Upon a Time” (Morgan John and
Rinvolucri Mario, 1984) and “The Storytelling Handbook for Primary Teachers” (Ellis
Gail and Brewster Jean, 1991). A brief summary of these underlying theories have been
included in the following section of this study.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Members of the National Storytelling Association claim that most dictionaries

define a story as a narrative account of a real or imagined event or set of events. Within
the storytelling community, a story is more generally agreed to be a specific structure of
narrative with a specific style and set of characters which includes a sense of
completeness.

According to Wright (1995), stories refer to any description of a series of events

whether true or untrue. Within the term stories he includes myths, legends, fairy stories
and fables which originated in the oral form. But stories also include written fiction, and
in particular, short-stories.

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines short-story as an invented

prose narrative shorter than a novel usually dealing with a few characters and aiming at
unity of effect often concentrating on the creation of mood rather than plot.

According to Ellis and Brewster (1991), children enjoy listening to stories in

their mother tongue and understand the conventions of narrative. For example, as soon
as they hear the formula “Once upon a time...” they know what to expect next. For this
reason, storybooks can provide an ideal introduction to the foreign language presented
in a context that is familiar to the child. That is, as Wright (1995) suggests, stories,
which rely so much on words, offer a major and constant source of language experience
for children.
Some of the most important reasons why stories should play a central role in
teaching a foreign language to children are the following:
 Stories are motivating and fun and can develop positive attitudes towards the
foreign language and language learning since children have a constant need for

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 stories and they will always be willing to listen to them, if the right moment is
chosen.
 Children want to find meaning in stories, so they listen with a purpose. If they
find meaning they are rewarded by their ability to understand, which motivates
them even more. This is in contrast to so many activities in foreign language
learning, which have little or no intrinsic interest or value for children.
 Stories exercise the imagination. Children can become personally involved in a
story as they identify with the characters and try to interpret the narrative and
illustrations.
 Stories are a useful tool in linking fantasy and the imagination with the child’s
real world. They provide a way of enabling the children to make sense of their
everyday life and forge links between home and school.
 Listening to stories in class is a shared social experience and storytelling provokes
a shared response of laughter, sadness, excitement and anticipation which is not
only enjoyable but can help build up the child’s confidence and awareness of
others.
 Listening to stories develops the child’s listening skills via: visual clues (pictures
and illustrations), their prior knowledge of how language works and their general
knowledge. This allows them to understand the overall meaning of a story and to
relate it to their personal experience.
 Even though children are experts at searching for meaning, predicting and
guessing in their own language, doing so in the foreign language is a difficult task
for them and it takes time. Stories constitute a good way of helping the learners
build up the listening and reading skills.
 The experience of the story encourages responses through speaking and writing.
In this way, children are given opportunities to express their likes and dislikes,
and to exchange their ideas and associations related to the stories they hear or
read.
 Listening and reading stories and responding to them through speaking and
writing develop a sense of being. Learning a language is useless if we do not
know how to communicate or how to listen to others and understand them.
 Stories help children become aware of the general “feel” and sound of the foreign
language. They also introduce children to language items and sentence

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 constructions without their necessarily having to use them productively. They can
build up a reservoir of language in this way. When the time comes to move the
language items into their productive control, it is not great problem because the
language is not new to them.
 Children enjoy listening to stories over and over again. This frequent repetition
allows certain language items to be acquired while others are being reinforced.
Many stories also contain natural repetition of key vocabulary and structures
which help the children to remember every detail, so that they can gradually learn
to anticipate what is about to happen next in the story. Repetition also encourages
participation in the narrative, thereby providing a type of pattern practice in
meaningful context.
 Stories are an excellent way to introduce language that learners are not yet
familiar with, be it a point of grammar, a function, an area of vocabulary, or
pronunciation. Stories present language in a context that is easy to understand.
The language items new to the child are experienced as part of the fabric of
meaning, and this invites the child to hypothesize on the meaning offered by the
new item within that fabric.

As stated by Morgan and Rinvolucri (1984), among both practising language

teachers and applied linguists there is an increasing awareness that successful second-
language learning is far more a matter of unconscious acquisition than of conscious,
systematic study. But, even if explicit grammatical references are made, it is generally
agreed that children must first of all have a rich experience of the grammatical items
used in a meaningful way. Stephen Krashen (1981) claims that foreign language
learners acquire the target language more quickly and successfully through exposure to
situations where the target language is used naturally than through explicit grammar
instruction and pattern practice. He also claims that the major function of the second-
language classroom is to provide intake for acquisition. The “intake” required to
facilitate language acquisition will be very different from the materials currently
provided in the classroom as part of systematic structural or notional courses.
Brumfit (1985) states that there has been a growing interest in the teaching of
language through literature in which literary texts are used as a resource for language.
That is, they are incorporated into the syllabus and they are exploited as language
material. Although the texts being used are literary, and some of the responses of the

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readers are discussed in literary terms, the main intention is to teach language, not
literature, and the texts may be used as contexts for exemplification and discussion of
linguistic items which have no bearing on the value of the work as literature.

METHODOLOGY

As regards the research design, an experimental method has been adopted since
a hypothesis will be tested experimentally in a controlled context. Experimental
research is concerned with studying the effect of specified and controlled treatments
given to subjects usually formed into groups.
Experimental research is characterised by its analytic and deductive nature. That
is, the research will approach the study from an analytic perspective by investigating
one of the constituent parts of the phenomenon. Besides, a research design with a
deductive objective or purpose begins with a preconceived notion about what may be
found. This preconceived notion is then formulated as a prediction or hypothesis to be
confirmed or rejected. In this research project our hypothesis is formulated in the
following way:
When students are introduced to a new grammatical item via stories, they
produce highly accurate written texts on their own.
All experimental approaches involve the control or manipulation of three basic
components of the experiment: the population, the treatment and the measurement of
the treatment.

The population
As we have decided to conduct the experiment by adopting a control group
design, the population of our research will consist of two groups: a group to whom the
treatment will be administered, whose performance will be compared with another
group which will receive no treatment.
This study uses two groups of twelve 9-year-old students each. They will be
groups that already exist prior to the research at a private school called “Escuela del
Valle” in General Roca, Rio Negro, Argentina. The participants will be elementary
students who will be taught by the same teacher, that is, their usual English course
instructor. She will be in charge of introducing the treatment (the independent variable
in the research) in one of the groups while she goes on with her ordinary lessons in the

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other. At this school, students are exposed to the Second Language for two hours
everyday. That is, they have English lessons from 13:30 to 15:30 the whole week.
Besides, they receive exposure to the foreign language in other subjects such as History.
They have History lessons twice a week for about one hour each day.

Treatment
The experimental group will work with a traditional short-story three hours a
week on different days during a fortnight, as proposed by Ellis and Brewster (1991).
The story chosen (treatment) is called “The Turnip” by Aleksei Tolstoy included in The
Storytelling Handbook for Primary Teachers by the same authors (Appendix A). At first
the teacher will work out the meaning of this narrative with the students by telling it
aloud and asking them to carry out different kinds of activities which will focus on
getting the general plot of the story. She will engage the students not only in oral
activities such as debates and answering questions but also in written activities such as
matching, answering True/False, among others. The idea is to make students analyse the
characters, the plot and setting of the story and draw conclusions about the overall
message of it. After having worked with the meaning of the story, the teacher will
introduce the simple past tense to the students. She will present the new grammatical
item in an inductive way, that is, she will use the story as a context and she will
encourage the students to infer the meaning, use and form of the simple past.
The other group will work with the textbook they have been working with up to
the moment of the research (Whizz Kids 2 (1998) Macmillan Heinemann). They will be
taught the simple past, also in an inductive way, but without a meaningful context such
as the one used with the experimental group. The teacher will copy some isolated
sentences on the board in which the simple past tense is used and by means of questions
she will guide the students to infer the meaning, use and form of the new structure.

Measurement of the treatment

The effects of the treatment will be evaluated by means of a written language
examination (Appendix B). It will consist of a discrete point test whose aim is to
measure students’ accuracy. That is, as we want to prove whether students improve their
language written accuracy if they are presented with a new grammatical item by using a
traditional short-story as a context, we believe that it may be appropriate to use this kind

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of test. It will be administered to the two groups by the teacher in charge of the courses
after having presented them with the simple past tense and practising the new structure.
They will be checked by the researchers and the results will provide data on the
students’ performance.

DATA ANALYSIS PROCEDURE

The results of the tests will be analysed quantitatively. We will mainly consider
the number of students who have and have not passed the exam in each group. The
passing mark will be seven. For the sake of clarity, different bar charts will be employed
to show the results so that they can be appreciated straightforwardly.
The first bar chart will indicate the percentage of students from the two groups
(experimental and control groups) who have passed and failed the exam, making
emphasis on the percentage of students who have passed from each group.
Bar chart sample 1: The vertical axis will show the percentage of students and
the horizontal one will represent each group.

100%

50%

0%
Experimental Control Group
Group

Students who have failed

Students who have passed

The second bar chart will compare the results of the two groups according to the
percentage of students who have passed and failed the test, making emphasis on the
latter.
Bar chart sample 2:

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 100%

50%

0%
Experimental Control Group
Group

Students who have passed

Students who have failed

The third and fourth bar charts will show the marks the students from each group
will get in the test. This will be useful in case the number of students who have passed
or failed the exam in both groups is the same. By analysing the data in this way, we will
be able to compare the results by taking into account not the number of learners who
have passed but their marks.
Bar chart samples 3 and 4:

12

10

8
Experimental
6
Group
4

0
1a 4y 6 7 8 9 10
3 5

12

10

6 Control Group

0
1a 4y 6 7 8 9 10
3 5

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 ANTICIPATED OUTCOME

In our view, the results of this study might confirm the hypothesis we have stated
at the beginning of this research project. We might anticipate that the experimental
group will be more accurate in the test than the control group. We might also prove that,
by using a story as a context for introducing the simple past tense, the students may
profit from this meaningful context, and therefore, perform better in the exam.
Furthermore, the outcome of this study could lead to the systematic
implementation of traditional short-stories in the classroom since they may prove to be
very useful in the sense that learners are not only given the opportunity to find the
lesson more appealing as they enjoy listening to a story but also to get exposure to
authentic target language, which is not frequently found when working with
coursebooks. At the same time, English language teachers who are worried about
learners’ accuracy in the target language might find traditional short-stories a useful tool
to motivate students as well as to introduce novel target structures.

CONCLUSION

All things considered, we believe that traditional short-stories provide

learners with rich exposure to situations where the target language is used naturally and
this gives them the ‘intake’ required to facilitate language acquisition, which is very
different from the materials currently used in the classrooms such as coursebooks.
Because of this, we think that this research project might demonstrate that the
value of short-stories should not be underestimated and it might lead to the systematic
incorporation of traditional short-stories into the syllabuses since they can be exploited
as language material by being used as contexts for exemplification and discussion of
linguistic items. As well as this, since stories are motivating and fun, learners might also
have the chance to enjoy themselves while working with the language. Thus, they might
develop positive attitudes towards the foreign language as well as language learning.

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 REFERENCES
 Brumfit, C. & Carter, R (1986). Literature and Language Teaching. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
 Brumfit, C. (1985). Language and Literature Teaching: From Practice to
Principle. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
 Brumfit, C., Moon, J & Ray, T. (1991). Teaching English to Children: From
Practice toPrinciple. London: Collins ELT.
 Brumfit, C. (1992). Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching. The Roles
of Fluency and Accuracy. Great Britain: Cambridge University Press.
 Ellis, G. & Brewster, J. (1991). The Storytelling Handbook for Primary Teachers.
England: Penguin English.
 Morgan, J. & Rinvolucri, M. (1984). Once Upon a Time. Great Britain: Cambridge
University Press.
 Wright, A. (1996). Storytelling with Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 http://www.eldrbarry.net/roos/st_defn.htm
 http://www.hltmag.co.uk/sep00/mart2b.htm
 http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol33/no1/P2.htm

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