StoryListening in the Classroom with Margarita Pérez-García

Imagine having your students acquire 0.20 words per minute! That’s 1,200 words per 100 hours of instruction. When Margarita Pérez-García, my guest in episode 102 of Growing with Proficiency The Podcast, heard from Dr. Beniko Mason that there is a Second Language Acquisition methodology that can accomplish that, she was on a mission to bring this methodology to her classroom.

This methodology is “Story Listening”. In episode 102, Margarita dives into the following aspects:

• What is Story Listening?
• Why is Story Listening a method to provide OPTIMAL input?
• What are the steps to Story Listening?
• What are the most common obstacles when a teacher is trying to incorporate this methodology in their classroom?
• How to overcome these obstacles.

In this post, I’ll highlight our conversation on Story Listening, but to hear all of the details, listen above or here. 

What is Story Listening?

First, Margarita shared with us her experience with implementing Story Listening in her classes in the UK and New Zealand. Next, I asked her to explain Story Listening. 

Margarita began by saying that Story Listening can be described as. “Comprehensible, compelling, rich, and abundant”. It is compelling because it is interesting in a way that it holds your attention. It is rich because it is diverse and varied. Story Listening also focuses on providing a plethora of comprehensible, or as Margarita would say, potentially comprehensible input to the students. 

Story Listening is a second language instructed method that is input driven and will provide comprehensible input of two sides. Margarita continued explaining, “On one hand, it provides auditory comprehensible input. And on the other side, it provides the opportunity to process written input.” Story listening is not just the listening to a story, it is a multimodal approach, incorporating auditory input delivered by the teacher and written input through Guided Self-Selected Reading.

Students read as much as they can in a year. They read books that are comprehensible, of course. It is also important that this is done in an environment where the student is not accountable. Margarita explained. “There is no expectation of immediate mastery, but rather as the students listen and reads, they will develop their linguistic system on their own following the natural order of acquisition.”

Interaction in Story Listening

You might be surprised when you listen to episode 102 when Margarita states that Story Listening has no interaction. Margarita refers back to Dr. Stephen Krashen’s teachings that optimal input is sufficient, and our ability to speak and write fluently and accurately is the result of acquiring the language from input. Listen to episode 82 here to hear more from Dr. Krashen.

Obstacles with Story Listening

I asked Margarita to discuss some obstacles that she’s seen in the community with implementing Story Listening. First, she said, that you will have non believers in the optimal input alone hypothesis. Another obstacle that Margarita has faced is that to the untrained eye of a colleague or an administrator, they seem to find that story listening is lacking. Because they say, they think that it would be extremely difficult that students sit and listen to 6000 minutes of stories, 100 other stories, and they do nothing else in a given year.

Some of the challenges I see is that it’s just not going to work in my classroom for so many reasons; the reasons that Margarita mentioned, having very big classes, having students who may not be interested, or who may just be there because they have to be there. Margarita addressed some of these challenges in our conversation.

4 Steps of Story Listening

Margarita then walked us through the four steps of Story Listening. 

1. Selecting what your students will listen to.
2. Creating the language guide or the prompter that will help you to tell the story.
3. Provide the language that is easy to understand.
4. Applying strategies to help students to understand better.

We go more in depth with these steps in episode 102. 

Stories for Story Listening

For Story Listening, we are encouraged to use fairy tales because fairy tales touch upon universal themes and they have stood the test of time. However, Margarita has found these a bit difficult to put into practice. Listen to episode 102 to find out why. Instead, she uses folk tales, myths, or legends from the original people of the lands where she teaches.

Margarita also went more in depth with the stories that she uses for this method. Not only does she use story books from other colleagues, but she also uses the books that she has authored. Find them here. Margarita has worked in schools with a very traditional curriculum and used those traditional books also for Story Listening. More ways to do Story Listening: with a poem, song, research article, or a newspaper article.

Other Strategies

To make a prompter, Margarita shared a resource from Dr. Beniko Mason. You can find the link to his website below. Listen to episode 102 to hear Margarita explain how she sets one up. 

For making it understandable and providing comprehensible input, there are things you can do for your students. Some strategies mentioned by Margarita:

• Look at your students and speak with a clear articulation with a slower than normal rate.
• Use shorter sentences to which you have operated a syntactic simplification.
• Give lots of pausing so they can process the input that you are going to repeat.
• Try to play on the highest frequency level or the highest frequency range to expose your students to the most frequent language.
• There are also two sides; a nonverbal and a verbal side. The nonverbal are the drawings on the white or chalk board.

Margarita and I then discussed the difference between content versus function words. Function words account for about 55% of every communication. So, they are really frequent. As a rule for Margarita when she works with beginners, she tends to write a lot. We also discussed whether or not we should be erasing the meaning of words. If you leave the translation on the board, you can point and pause again and again so that there are more opportunities for the students to make that match. 

Finally, we talked about the paraphrase in the second column of the prompter. I asked Margarita how we should introduce these new words. She described five steps that should be taken. 

The steps are:

1. Before telling the word, you use a synonym of the word and maybe a drawing.
2. Use an opposite word that is already in students’ vocabulary.
3. Paraphrase, you will use a new language, a new way of saying that.
4. Enrich, you will use similar words perhaps from another frequency or cognates that the students know.
5. Finally, write your target word as you use it and as you say it.

We concluded the episode with Margarita sharing a beginner lesson that you can do if you want to try Story Listening. Listen to episode 102 above or here. I hope you try Story Listening with your students, and if you do, let me know how it went.