Make Them Listen 3: Language
Make Them Listen 3: Language
What to do if your learners struggle to engage with your shared reading because the language goes over their head...
This is the Education newsletter from Storyteller Chip. If this isn’t what you signed up for (maybe you’re more fascinated by history, or you just love a good story!), then you can pick your newsletters by following this link, scrolling to ‘Subscriptions’, and selecting ‘Storyteller Chip’.
Right now, though, let’s release the sounds…
When helping educators attract their learners’ engagement in a story or class book, there are typically three main reasons why learners aren’t interested:
In the last of this three-part series, we’re looking at…
Language
By sheer coincidence, just two days ago before writing this, I was leading a workshop for teachers of T-Level Early Years & Education students, and this question came up:
“How do you encourage children to love reading when they possess a level of vocabulary too low for the texts on offer?”
I’ve already covered a similar topic in my post-World Book Day series; the article on how to engage learners with [English as] an Additional Language revealed my ‘Bigging It Up’ technique for drawing audiences into stories even if they understand nothing you’re saying. So I could end this article here and simply direct you to that one.
But there’s actually a little more I can say about it here, even more than you’ll find in the educators handbook All the Better to Read You With, and which that T-Level teacher gave me the opportunity to practice sharing with you the other Friday. $;-)
That little more is this: start by telling stories, as opposed to shared reading or guided reading. Yes, the goal is to inspire independent readers, but I promise you: telling stories entirely orally will get your learners there far faster than those alternatives.
Here’s why.
With guided reading, the young reader largely leads the tone. The focus is usually on their ability to read, with a bit of comprehension thrown in every now and then. The comprehension is naturally tougher, because the reader has been focusing on decoding.
With shared reading, the words are not yours. Yes, you can use the ‘Reverse Bigging It Up’ principle mentioned in the article above – and that’s extremely powerful. But it’s a far slower technique for building contextual vocab learning, because of course you’re dumbing it down rather than bigging it up.
With storytelling, you’re looking your learners in the eye and taking them with you. You can gauge their current level of understanding, big up your phrases as you go, and even throw in the odd comprehension question totally naturally as if it’s part of the story.
You’re leading your learners through the process of contextual vocabulary learning by example.
Here’s an example from one of my ‘greatest hits’, a story I’ve found is guaranteed to appeal to virtually all audiences of any age in any situation…
“With his future wife sitting behind him on the saddle, the prince rode straight home. But unfortunately, the straight route home took him through the garden of a giant. Not just any giant, either, but a mean, mighty, magical giant. A giant who really didn’t like trespassers in his garden.
“That giant leapt in front of the prince’s party, causing the horse to rear up on its hind legs, the prince to open his mouth wide with terror, and the princess to desperately clutch her tiara as she fell rapidly to the ground.
“But the princess didn’t hit the ground. Nor did the prince close his mouth, and the horse’s hooves never came back down. Instead, they remained in those exact positions, but with their skin and clothes changed to a pale grey colour.
“They had been petrified.
“Does anyone here know what petrified means?”
Sometimes I get the right answer there. But more often than not, someone answers ‘really scared’, to which I respond…
“That’s exactly what I used to think too! But when I first heard this story, I learned that being petrified means being made to go grey, hard, and still – like a statue. The prince, his fiancée, and his horse had all been turned into stone.”
It’s true, you could do something like the above with shared reading. But with most books, you’re unlikely to find a passage where the writer describes what’s happened, and then labels it with higher level vocab so neatly for you afterward.
For example, George Dasent, who wrote the English translation of this oral tale from the Norwegian folklorists (Asbjörnsen and Moe) who first captured it in print (at least so far as we know), only described the same scene thus:
“But when they had gone a good bit on their way, they passed close by a steep hillside, like a wall, where the giant's house was, and there the giant came out, and set his eyes upon them, and turned them all into stone, princes and princesses and all.”
With storytelling, you can add in the higher vocab as soon as you feel your learners can take it – and chances are, if you use this method, you’ll find them ready to take it earlier than you think.
“But wait! some educators quickly call. “That’s storytelling without books. We want them reading. How is oral literacy going to achieve that?”
It’s a valid question, and one even I asked myself once upon a time. My search for the answer is what led to me write the English Hub handbook, All the Better to Read You With: Stories & Lessons to Inspire Reading for Pleasure. You’ll find a few case studies in there of learners who heard me telling stories for as little as an hour, and whose parents reported them subsequently picking up books eagerly for the first time – including some with EAL.
In my experience, though, most educators are happy to accept that talking through stories with learners is a great precursor to their writing – both to work out the words they want to write on the page, and also to spark their imaginations.
But it’s actually that same ability of storytelling to spark the imagination, alongside the flexibility it affords you with the language, that fires up the learner’s curiosity to find more stories in books.
And best of all? Oral storytelling and fiction reading both have a key thing in common: they’re word-based creativity. That means the books your learners are guided to via storytelling won’t be graphic novels, encyclopaedias, magazines etc. They’ll be books where a story is told primarily through print. And that’s ideal, because a 2018 study found learners of all ages with the best reading skills were those who chose to read fiction.
I hope this series has inspired you to try storytelling and/or shared reading as your learners’ routes into reading. If you’re still unsure about your own storytelling and shared reading abilities, though, there are a few ways to get more support. First, if you haven’t already, make sure you’re subscribed to this newsletter: story-led learning is what this is all about!
Second, please talk to me! Reply to my newsletters, or use the comment button below. Let me know how you’re getting on, or if there are any areas you’d like extra tips on.
And finally… Remember how I said above that most books aren’t written in a way that sits neatly with the storytelling approach? Well there are a few I know that are… because I wrote them!
The best starting point is All the Better to Read You With, because that handbook includes storytelling techniques you can use during shared reading, stories written using the ‘Bigging It Up’ principle, and lesson plans aimed at guiding your learners from shared reading to independent reading of their own choice.
But the entire Fables & Fairy Tales series produced by myself and illustrator Korky Paul is also built around the ‘Bigging It Up’ principle – and the Epic Educator editions are especially designed for your shared reading. If you fancy using stories to teach your whole curriculum, not just reading for pleasure, then they are the best way to feed two birds with one scone.
And for joining me here, you can get 25% off either All the Better, a whole year of Epic Educator editions, or both. Just hit the button(s) below and use MAKELISTEN2 at checkout.
Please let me know how ‘Bigging It Up’ impacts your learners’ engagement with stories and reading – I’d love to hear your stories!
Coming soon: insights from the UKLA Primary Literacy Conference.