In his previous post on thinking skills, Hebert Puchta explored Keiran Egan’s model of the thinking process, and looked at some of the insights it offers into the development of the human mind and the language learning process. Here, he continues exploring that model by looking into story thinking.
Story thinking
Egan points out that stories play an essential role in the cognitive development of children. He stresses that the story form is something people in all cultures enjoy. Stories, however, function as more than mere entertainment – they help the child develop an understanding of the world and their own life experiences.
But a word of caution seems appropriate; there are certain criteria that a piece of text needs to comply with in order to qualify as a story – and more often than not in language teaching materials we come across a so-called story that just doesn’t deserve to be called that. Here’s an imaginary (and exaggerated, I hasten to add) example. We have a story in which we are presented with a boy and a girl, Annabel and Oliver.
They greet each other in a friendly way and introduce themselves to each other. Then Oliver introduces some of his family; this is my uncle, James, and that’s my aunt, Emma. (We can see Aunt Emma, by the way, standing on the other side of a nearby river, which is fortunate, as it helps to justify the deictic use of ‘that’.) Annabel wants to follow suit, and luckily she has her brother and her sister at hand; this is my brother, Benjamin, and that’s my sister, Kylie. It seems that such excessive social protocol makes both of them hungry … otherwise why else would Oliver then say; now let’s eat this cake.? Luckily, Annabel knows better: no, let’s eat that cake. The ‘story’ evolves further with the two kids suggesting and counter-suggesting a number of other food items, and it comes to a bizarre round-up when Benjamin suggests they should have an ice cream, leading to Annabel’s final utterance, the warning; but don’t be greedy.
What is called a story here is anything but – and we can easily prove that if we use Egan’s criteria for the kinds of elements a story needs to contain in order to engage the young listener or reader. First of all, a story needs to engage the reader or listener emotionally, and in order to do so it needs a clear beginning (setting the scene), a middle part (where things develop in an unexpected way, leading to conflict and hence emotional engagement) and an end (where the conflict gets resolved). The story only works if there is some kind of tension – an unexpected turn, a complication of the plot, a surprise element, or something that shocks the reader or listener, making him or her feel worried, sad, etc. For that, we need what Egan calls binary opposites that create strong emotional contrasts, contraposing concepts such as good and bad, rich and poor, happy and sad, tiny and huge.
So if Oliver has a dog that gets bitten by a poisonous snake while he is involved in his social chit-chat with Annabel, the reader or listener find themselves in a story all of a sudden. Will the dog survive? What will the children do? Are they themselves in danger? are some immediate thoughts that show the reader’s or listener’s engagement. The protagonists, however, don’t have time to consider these questions at length. As soon as they begin to understand how serious the situation is, Annabel remembers her aunt, a wise old woman. When the children seek her advice, she suggests they go to a place high up in the mountains where they can find a tree with golden apples, one of which the dog should eat. They manage to find the tree and the dog is saved.
It’s not difficult to imagine which of the two versions of a story will engage children more. But unfortunately, when ELT authors create stories they all too often have language alone in mind. Story relevance doesn’t seem to matter, because the ‘story’ is seen merely as a vehicle for the language. In our invented example, the language elements which the author wants to pack into the story are deixis (this and that); making suggestions (Now let’s eat this cake.), and making an alternative suggestion (No, let’s eat that cake.). But it’s not difficult to guess that that text will fail to gain the attention of the learners and because there is nothing memorable about the story, little of its language will remain in their memory.
Stories, Egan stresses, communicate information and at the same time help us to understand how to feel about it; and that’s why they are so powerful – more powerful than any other form of language. Only stories can have such lasting effects on the recipients, and that’s why we use stories all the time in real life to convey meanings. We use stories to impress others, to make friends, to justify behaviour and give reasons for it, to influence people, to support and to entertain.
Read the other posts in this series:
Developing young learners’ thinking skills #1 – developing and applying thinking skills
Developing young learners’ thinking skills #2 – Thinking skills: Model 1
Developing young learners’ thinking skills #4 – Multiple intelligences
Developing young learners’ thinking skills #5 – Combining the teaching of thinking and language