Story Listening
Story Listening is a method developed by Beniko Mason. It is based on the second language acquisition principles of Dr. Stephen Krashen. Beniko Mason has gradually refined her method over more than 30 years of experience, increasingly embracing Krashens' vision. Her approach focuses entirely on comprehensible input.
Beniko Mason herself describes her method as "simply telling folktales with comprehensible and enriched language".
These stories, which often reflect real life, contain words that may not all be high-frequency, but help immerse the learner in the story.
A Story Listening session proceeds as follows:
This method is therefore quite simple and can be used by anyone.
However, it's not a bad idea to watch a few videos before you start yourself. Here are a few videos from Kathrin Shechtman and Albert Subirats that you can watch.
Kathrin Shechtman remains my great role model for Story Listening. I watched a lot of her videos before I started using this method myself.
In the example below, you can see why I find her way of storytelling so effective:
Beniko Mason herself describes her method as "simply telling folktales with comprehensible and enriched language".
These stories, which often reflect real life, contain words that may not all be high-frequency, but help immerse the learner in the story.
A Story Listening session proceeds as follows:
- The teacher tells the story while also drawing it. Additionally, non-verbal language, intonation, gestures, dialogues, descriptions, photos, sounds, etc., are used as much as possible - in other words, everything that can enhance the comprehensibility (and therefore the engagement with the story) of the students.
- The story is not interrupted to ask comprehension questions or open questions (or to circle as in TPRS), and after the story, no exercises on vocabulary, text comprehension, or grammar are given.
- The "true art of Story Listening" lies in telling the story in such a way that the students are captivated and thus subconsciously learn new words.
- Beforehand, you can optionally write and explain the new words that will be introduced in the story on the board (not applicable if you are working with illiterate students), including translations.
- Beniko Mason has her students write a summary of the story in their native language afterwards. I personally have some reservations about this last part, but I presume that she teaches English to Japanese students (at the university) and thus will understand the summaries - in our groups (where most students speak a language I do not know), this is certainly not so obvious!
- Story Listening is therefore a method for both beginners and advanced learners and starts from stories. These stories can also be presented in written form after telling them.
- Beniko Mason advocates for letting students read as much as possible (stories/books at the language level of the individual student!). The more you read, the broader your vocabulary grows, the better your sentence structure becomes - in short, the better you master the language. I fully agree with her on this! I am also a strong advocate of reading together (reading out loud and letting the students read along - occasionally stopping and letting the students comment on what they have read), individual reading at a slightly higher level (during a "class library moment"). I truly believe in the power of reading to better master a language.
This method is therefore quite simple and can be used by anyone.
However, it's not a bad idea to watch a few videos before you start yourself. Here are a few videos from Kathrin Shechtman and Albert Subirats that you can watch.
Kathrin Shechtman remains my great role model for Story Listening. I watched a lot of her videos before I started using this method myself.
In the example below, you can see why I find her way of storytelling so effective:
- She continuously names everything she draws, to not disturb the flow of the story and provide even more comprehensible input.
- She repeats and repeats while she draws. However, this is not at all disruptive.
- She uses a lot of gestures to clarify.
- She also uses her voice (imitating a cat, stepping on strawberries, singing, ...)
|
|
|
|
|
|
