The Language Teacher
02 - 2002

Making Stories Understandable: Some Tips

Tim Murphey

Yuan Ze University

<mits@saturn.yzu.edu.tw>

When you tell stories, remember that not understanding is a frustrating experience for students and that understanding is crucial to language learning. Here are some tips to make stories completely understandable.

  1. Take one small chunk at a time. You can choose to speak only a little more English in each class. Maybe just one short story a day. It may start with only a few lines.
  2. Pre-teach some vocabulary before telling the story.
  3. Draw pictures on the board and label things if needed.
  4. Bring real things to the classroom and pre-teach them if necessary. Use exaggerated gestures and lots of them. Keep them consistent and repeat them the same way each time.
  5. Use place anchors (place a person or object in space through your gestures and remember where you left them so you can refer back to them).
  6. Repeat a lot. The words with the gestures. Repeat a lot! With gestures!
  7. Make pauses. . . . . Long pauses . . . . . as long as you need. . . . Notice the students' faces when you pause . . . . . Often they will tell you when you need to repeat . . . Then repeat . . . and pause. . . . . It's in the pauses that the brain has time to make sense of things. Use pauses . . . and short chunks.
  8. Practice with colleagues and tell stories in several classes. You learn to do it better as you do it more.
  9. Get excited and dramatize your stories. That attracts students' attention and makes things much more understandable. And even if they don't understand, they'll laugh! And if they do that they will at least have understood that class can be a fun place!

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