story telling for language learning

By Miss Boop

From 20th to 24th of October 2005 MEXTESOL carried out a big event on Zacatecas city, which received participans from MExico and other countries. This city gave the welcome to the 32nd. National and 1st International convention called "Crossing boundaries in TEFL"; we have a very good program whith national and international presenters, who gave us different kinds of opic related to TEFL in order to improve put professional lives.

I had the opportunity to enjoy many presentations, but one that my attention focussed on wasin which Sandy Miller and Patricia Lima Costa did as a workshop. Its name was "Storytelling For Language Learning", they did a great job showing us how a tale ir story can be useful tool for the EFL classroom for both children and adults. Their presentation included information on making communicative activities. They gave us the chance to learn how to use a tale and some examples of how to expand stories with activities in all the skill areas.

The workshop lasted 50 minutes and unfortunatelly it was not enough time for them to present everything that they wanted. The first presenter was Sandy Miller. She has just completed a Master's Degree in TESOL at West Virginia University and is currently a part time instructor in WVU's intensive English Program, she also holds a BA in Education from Central Michigan University and Master's Degree in Library Science from Wester Michigan University.

She started telling us which kinds of floktales exist and also the parts of them (openning phrase, characters, setting, initial incident, plot development, climax and the concluding statementes) in which she explained each of them. After that, she mentioned why we should use storytelling in our ESL class and how to choose a tale. She explained what an effective storyteller is like and gave some tips for learning a tale.  Something important was that at the beginning of their explanation we had the chance to do an excercice with those tales.

The second part was presented by Patricia Lima Costa, who is working in her Master's Degree in TESOL t West Virginia University and is a teaching Asistant in WVU's intensive English Program. She holds a BA in English from Universidade Federal do Espirito Santo, Brazil. She has thaught EFL from many years to all ages.

Patricia aslo spoke about the same topic but focused on teenage students. Her presentation was shorter that the other teacher, because the last activity of the teacher Sandy took more time than what she had been planning, that happened because of the number of people attending, so that the other teacher could not do her activities and she only gave us a short explanation about how te use a tale for teachind a second language. Something good was that although she was in hurry, her presentation was good and interesting.

I think the weak point of the presntation was the time and the number of people because they expected fewer people would go. Sometimes the presenters lost the controll of the demonstraton because of the number of teachers who attended. Nevertheless they as proffessional teachers could manage the workshop. the strong point was that their presentation was meaningful and helful for all of  the teachers and students who observed and listened to the,. because that allowed us to see how a tale could help students to learn a language.

I really enjoyed that demonstration because I learned many things from that conference and I also had the opportunity to interact with teachers who share their oppinions and their knowledge with me from thich I learned as well.

In conclusion I can say that with a tale students can learn more that grammar  or vocabulary, they also develop their skills depending on the activities that teachers carries out and at the same time students learn something about the world's folk litetature.