LEARNING THROUGH STORIES

By :

Siska Novia 171220091

Theofany Sabtiandy R. 171220098

STUDY PROGRAM ENGLISH EDUCATION

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE DEPARTMENT
STKIP-PGRI
BANDAR LAMPUNG
2020
 FOREWORD

First of all thank to almighty god Allah SWT because by His grace we can finish this
paper about "Learning through Stories" well, although still many flaws in it. And also
we thank to Sir Akhmad Sutiyono, S.Pd., M.Pd. as the lecturer of Teaching English for
Chidren that has given this task to us.
We really hope this paper can be useful in order to increase our insight and knowledge
of Learning Stories. We are also fully aware that in this paper there is a shortage and is
far from perfect. Therefore, we expect criticism and suggestions for the improvement of
the papers we will make in the future.
Hopefully this simple paper can be understood for anyone who reads it. If the paper we
have put together can be useful for both ourselves and those who read it. Previously we
apologize if there are any errors of words that are less favorable and we ask for
constructive criticism and suggestions from you for the improvement of this paper in the
future.

Bandar Lampung, April 4th, 2020

Authors

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword ii
Table of Contents iii
Chapter I Introduction 1
1.1 Background 1
1.2 Problem Formulation 1
1.3 Objectives of Writing 1
1.4 Advantages 2
Chapter II Discussion 3
2.1 Stories and Themes 3
2.2 The Discourse Organization of Stories
in Language Learning 4
2.3 Language Use in Stories 5
2.4 Quality in Stories 7
2.5 Choosing Stories to Promote
Language Learning 7
2.6 Ways of Using Stories 8
2.7 Developing Task around a Stories 8
Chapter III Closing 10
3.1 Conclusion 10
3.2 Advice 10
References

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 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background

The use of stories in language education is well attested. Stories may also be used
across the curriculum to teach content subjects. Life itself is full of stories: stories
told to inform, entertain, appreciate, stories about happiness, sadness and many
more. This has inspired me to become interested in using stories as a tool in
teaching and learning. I believe stories can be a powerful tool if used effectively
across the curriculum. I believe that stories can be used in developing language.

1.2 Problem Formulation

1. What are stories and themes in Learning throung Stories?

2. How is the discourse organisation of stories in Leaming through Stories?
3. How is language use in stories?
4. Is quality in stories important?
5. How to choose stories to promote language learning?
6. How are the ways of using a story?
7. How to develop tasks around a story?

1.3 Objectives of Writing

1. To know what stories and themes in Learning throung Stories are

2. To know the discourse organisation of stories in Leaming through Stories
3. To know the language use in stories
4. To know the quality in stories
5. To know how to choose stories to promote language learning
6. To know the ways of using stories
7. To know how to develop a task around a story

1.4 Advantage

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This paper is expected to add insight and references related to Learning through
stories.

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 CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION

2.1 Stories and Themes

Stories and themes are placed together because they represent holistic approaches
to language teaching and learning that place involvement with rich, authentic uses
of the foreign language. Stories offer a whole imaginary world, created by
language, that children can enter and enjoy, learning language overaching topics
or ideas that can branch out in many different directions, allowing chiodren to
pursue personal interests through the foreign language. Stories bring into the
classroom texts that originate in the world outside the school; themes organize
content and activity around ideas or topics that are broader than the organizing
ideas in most day to day classroom language learning, and that might be found
structuring high premium events on children as they go. Themes begin from
outside the classroom such as television documentaries or community projects.
In continuing to develop leaming-centered perspectives to teaching foreign
languages to children, I will emphasize the need for teachers to plan classroom
work with clear language learning goals in mind. Stories are frequently claimed
to bring many benefits to classrooms, to learners including young language
development (Wright 1997; Garvie 1990). The Power is attributed to stories,
which sometimes seems to move towards the mystical and magical, is probably
generated by their links into poetics and literature in one direction and to the
warmth of early childhood experiences in another. Stories can be served as
metaphors for society or for our deepest psychology (Bettleheim 1976), and
parent-child story reading can be rich and intimate events that contrast sharply
with the linear aridity of syllabuses and some course books (Garton and Pratt
1998). However, classrooms are not family sitting rooms, teachers are not their
pupils' parents, and many of the texts in books are found in schools are not poetic,
meaningful stories that will instantly capture children's imagination. I suggest that
we can best serve young learners by adopting a critical stance to the use of stories,
aiming to clarify the qualities of good stories for the language classrooms.

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Children participate in many literacy events outside school that involve texts that
are not stories, and that combine text and visuals in varied and dynamic ways. We
look first at what we mean by stories, differentiating stories from other kinds of
context in terms of what they contain and how they are composed. We examine
quality stories, and how we can discriminate good stories from less good ones.
We then move to what makes a story useful for foreign language learning.

2.2 The Discourse Organization of Stories in Language Learning

Story telling is an oral activity, and stories have the shapes they do because they
are designed to be listened to and, in many situations, participated in. The first,
obvious, key organizing feature of stories is that events happen at different points
in time; they occur in a temporal sequences. The other key organizing feature of
the story is their thematic structure i.e. there is some central interest factor
(theme) that changes over the timesale of the story: difficulties or evil are
overcome, or a major event is survived. Very often the thematic structure of a
story can be characterized as the resolution of a problem (Hoey 1983).
The structure of typical stories was analyzed by propp (1957) and many of the
same features have been found in the analysis of how people tell stories in their
conversations (Labov 1972).
1. An opening.
2. Introduction of characters.
3. Description of the settings.
4. Introduction of a problem.
5. A series of events.
6. The resolution of the problem.
7. A closing.
8. A moral.

2.3 Language Use in Stories

A. Parallelism

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The repeat pattern or parallelism creates a way into the story for the active
listener, as well as providing a natural support for language learning.

B. Rich Vocabulary

Because stories are designed to entertain, writers and tellers choose and use words
with particular care to keep the audience interested. The story may thus include
unusual words, or words that have a strong phonological content, with interesting
rhythms or sounds that are onomatopoeic. The context created by stories, its
predictable patterns or events and languages, and pictures, all act to support
listeners' understanding of unfamiliar words. Children will pick up words that
they enjoy and, in this way, stories offer space for growth in vocabulary.

C. Alliteration

Alliteration is the use of words that have the same initial consonants. For
exampole, red riding and big bad. It can offer a source for developing knowledge
of letter sounds.

D. Contrast

Stories for children often contain strong contrasts between characters or actions
or settings. Placing ideas in such clear opposition may well help children's
understanding of the story as a whole. For language learning, the lexical items
that are used in connection with each idea will also form contrasting sets, that
may help understanding and recall.

E. Metaphore

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Bettleheim (1976) suggests that our early experiences with fairy stories map are
subconsiously on to our real world experiences, and become a kind of script for
our lives. Claims of such power for these simple tales takes us far beyond the
foreign language classroom, although there are gifted individuals who have used
'story making' for educational and personal development (e.g Marshall 1963).

F. Intertextuality

This is the references within one text to other aspects of texts that have become
part of shared cultural knowledge. When children begin to write their own
stories, or little dramas, they may, just as adults writers do, involve familiar
characters or pieces of language used to describe making stories they know. This
appropriation of the voice of a writer is an integral part of first language
development (Bakhtin 1981), and can help in foreign language learning too.

G. Narrative / Dialogue

Within a story, we can distinguish two main uses of language: for Narrative text
concerns the series of events, narrative and for dialogue. whereas dialogue is
use of language as it would be spoken by the characters.

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2.4 Quality in Stories

The issue of what makes a good quality story is important but is clearly bound to
be somewhat subjective. A good story is, at one level, simply one that listeners
enjoy. However, stories that appeal more that others, and that remain favorites
with children and parents over many years, do demonstrate some common
features that can be identified as characterizing quality.
Quality stories have characters and a plot that engage children, often the art work
is as important as the text in telling the story, and they create a strong feeling of
satisfaction when the end is reached. A convincing and satisfying closure
includes the reader in those who 'live happily ever after'. Children need to be able
to enter the imaginative world that the story creates. This means that they can
understand enough about the characters and their lives to be able to empathize
with them.
So, a story about being lost in the desert that is not being used with children in
arctic countries will need to contain lots of details enabling them to imagine what
a desert looks and feels like to be in. Many stories for children include fantastical
beings or animals in imaginary worlds, but these characters and settings usually
bear enough response to children and end the real world for readers to imagine
them; monsters tend to live in families, tigers come to drink tea in the kitchen,
frogs and ducks get jealous all act in ways familiar to children.
Stories that have the qualities of content, organization and language use that we
have explored thus far are potentially useful tools in the foreign language
classroom, since they have the potential to capture children's interest and thus
motivation to learn, along with space for language growth. However, not all good
stories will automatically learn good language, and we now move to think about
what is involved in choosing and using a story not just for pleasure, but for
(pleasurable) language learning.

2.5 Choosing Stories to Promote Language Learning

In this section, we use the features of stories described so far to set out questions
that a language teacher might ask to evaluate the language learning opportunities
offered by a story in order to choose stories for the language classroom.
1. Real books of specially written ones?
2. Will the content engage the learners?
3. Are the values and attitudes embodied in the story acceptable?
4. How is the discourse organized?
5. What is the balance of dialogue and narrative?
6. How is language used?
7. What new language is used?

2.6 Ways of Using Stories

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 A. Evaluating the language learning opportunities of the story

Because the complex forms describe ideas that are comprehensible, they should
not cause too much of a problem for children who have been learning English for
2 or 3 years, and who can grasp the content. There is plenty of scope for children
to extend their English through the story. The parallelism, or repetition of
grammatical patterns, that occurs across the text is likely to be helpful to language
learning.

B. Language Learning Task Using the Story

Listening to the teacher read or tell a story is a useful language learning activity at
any age; using story books does not have to be about teaching reading. Listening
to a story practises the ability to hold in mind the meaning of an extended piece of
spoken discourse. The teacher telling the story would constitute the core activity
of the task, with children listening and looking at the illustrations, either sitting
close enough to the teacher to see or using large versions of the pictures. The main
language learning goal for the core activity of the task would be that the children
understand enough of the story to enjoy it. As a preparation activity, before the
story reading, it would be useful to introduce the ideas and some of the key
vocabulary, and the contrasting ideas and lexis that run through the story offer a
good place to start.

2.7 Developing Task around a Stories

A. Listening Skills

If a story appeals to children, they will want to hear it again and again. The five or
ten minutes spent listening to familiar story will re-activate vocabulary and
grammatical patterns, and offer opportunities for children to notice aspects of the
language use that passed them by on previous readings or that they have partly
learnt. In listening to a story, children are practising listening for 'gist', i.e. the
overall meaning. They can also be helped to focus on detail when the text is met
on further occasions. If the teacher records the story on to cassette during one of
the tellings, the recording can be used for further listening practice, at home or in
class.

B. Discourse Skills

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A story creates a world of characters who talk to each other and this discourse
world presents opportunities for communicative activities and work on discourse
skills. The dialogue in a story can be separated out from the narrative, if necessary
in a version simplified by the teacher, and spoken by the children who take on
roles of characters. If the teacher reads the narrative and children dress up and act
out the dialogue, the story becomes a performance that might entertain another
class, providing useful repeated practice in the process. Asking children to retell a
story in a foreign language is also a very demanding task, much more demanding
than in the first language. After all, one of the advantages of stories is that they
can be slightly beyond the children's receptive level because of the support they
offer to understanding. If children are to retell the story, they are asked to work at
this level in production. They are unlikely to be able to do this and the experience
will be difficult and perhaps de-motivating.

C. Focused Reading Skills Practice

Large versions of stories, or "big books', are very helpful to practise both top-
down and bottom-up skills in reading. With beginning readers, big books can be
uséd to show the direction in which books and sentences are read, to point out
repeated words and syllables, or initial consonants. More advanced readers can
read along with the teacher: listening and following silently the first time, joining
in the next time and eventually reading aloud individually. Just as it is useful
language practice to hear a familiar story many times, so it is useful literacy skills
practice to read a familiar story many times. The finding and integration of
information about letters, words and sentences can became more automatic each
time, and children will be motivated by feeling like fluent readers.
Comprehension skills can be practised through guided prediction during the
telling of the story, e.g. the teacher asks What do you think be will find when he
lands? Knowledge and skills at ietter-sound level can be practised by choosing
from the story repeated patterns to focus on.

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 CHAPTER III
CLOSING

3.1 CONCLUSION

Some of the considerations facing teachers in choosing and using stories for
language learning that teachers should critically evaluate the quality and the
languag-learning potential of stories before using them in the classroom. This
requires close attention to the discourse organisation, the use of language, and the
quality of the story. A writer's use of language is central to the quality of a book,
and so it is no coincidence that good quality children's stories also offer language
learning opportunities. We have examined various ways of using children's stories
in the foreign language classroom to help the development of vocabulary and
grammar, and of oral and literacy skills. To turn a children's story book into a tool
for language learning requires a teacher to deploy a range of skills and knowledge.
In language teaching and leaming, stories and themes overlap at the macro-level
of providing holistic learning experiences, but they also overlap at a more micro-
level, where a story can provide a theme to be explored (as in some of the
activities in the previous section), or where theme can be developed through the
use of stories. have suggested

3.2 Advice

Stories have language learning opportunities, if teachers can use the stories in
classrooms, stories will be a good media to help the development of vocabulary,
grammar, oral and literacy skills.

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 REFERENCES

Cameron, Lynne. 2001. Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

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