VIDEO: STORYTELLING TO SUPPORT ELLs IN WRITING AND READING

This video of Kyle Smith at Think College Now in Oakland Unified showcases a strategy from Teacher's College staff developer Amanda Hartman. It is a brief and engaging activity that supports both writing and reading and develops language in alignment with the new California ELD Standards.

You can read all about it first below or go straight to the video: Kyle Smith's Class: Storytelling-11-21-13

Category of Inquiry: Writing Workshop Tie-ins, Building Reading Strategies, Integrated ELD.

Post Written by: Kyle Smith, Michael Ray and Jennifer Kaufman, Oakland Unified School District

Source: Kyle Smith, 2nd Grade Teacher Leader at Think College Now as he implements an idea from Amanda Hartman's DVD Up Close: Teaching English Language Learners in Writing Workshop

Problem of Practice: ELLs may have difficulty with narrative writing due to the many language structures and supporting vocabulary that underpin this work. They might also find it difficult to summarize the key points of a story they read, both for language reasons, and because it is difficult to choose the key events in a narrative, particularly if you are a bit overwhelmed by language. In addition, using or comprehending rich vocabulary in writing and reading can be a challenge for students tackling general English knowledge and academic English at the same time.

Instructional Strategy: In writing workshop, before the mini-lesson, do a Storytelling activity that is repeated and elaborated further over the course of a week. The procedure is as follows:

1. Establish language partners so that the more proficient English speakers are paired with less proficient ones. These intentional language partnerships will give the less proficient speakers opportunities to hear models of higher levels of academic language besides the teacher (this is often called "academic eavesdropping"). In some cases there might even be instances when the higher level student provides corrective feedback for the lower-level student.

2. Choose a common experience or event that the class has participated in to serve as your practice for Storytelling. You may "stage" or "act out" the event with the students at the beginning. For example, in the Hartman video, and in Kyle Smith's class when he launched the Storytelling activity, the students learned to sing Isty Bitsy Spider. Once they were finished, that became the event that students could narrate. Examples of events that might have been experienced without intentional staging are a field trip, a fire drill, a party or a P.E. game. Other possible experience can be a teacher created situation where the teacher purposefully spills sometime or some other teacher or person outside of the class comes in and does something disruptive. 

3. The teacher narrates the event, touching one of five fingers for each new event, and modeling and posting key transition phrases for narrative such as "after that..." or "Finally..." that mark the beginning of each new section of the event narration when the new finger is touched. It is also helpful to have a gesture, hand motion, or movement for each part of the story.

4. Usually, the teacher has the more proficient member of the language partners begin, asking them to narrate the event while touching their fingers. The less proficient partner listens. The teacher circulates to offer support and gather information about how students are doing. Prompts to use while circulating:

• Tell it across your fingers.
• What happened next?
• Go back and tell all the parts
• Try and start the story with the action.
• What did you hear / say / see? 

5. Once the first partner has finished the narration, the teacher calls the group back together and narrates the events again, saying, "I heard people saying something like this," and then saying the whole thing again while touching fingers. Sometimes the teacher will add richer language to the narration, or add dialogue, etc.. 

6. It is the other partners turn to narrate. The teacher circulates again.

7. The teacher retells once more, referring to things he "heard." The whole thing is over in five to seven minutes. 

8. As the week progresses, the teacher returns to the same event and makes the narration progressively richer. The teacher may also support students with some in-context grammar, for example, regular and irregular past tense verbs anchored with vocabulary cards that the students might use in a particular narration. At the end of the week, the Storytelling can be turned into a shared or interactive writing experience:

• Shared Writing: Teacher directed, but student created. The teacher provides prompts, students provide the content. The teacher writes and draws.
• Interactive Writing: Focus on comprehension and conventions. The students provide the content and write the story together. 

9. This "story telling practice" can now be transferred to the student's own writing during workshop time. The teacher now has a common reference point to remind students how to sequence a story or reproduce any other structures they have practiced during story telling. The teacher might say, “Remember how we started the story of singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider? Can you start your story off in the same way? Remember when we added dialogue to the story about singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider? What do you think the character in your story might say here?”

Rationale: This lesson allows students to learn critical academic language related to both reading and writing supported by an engaging oral activity that then can lead right into the writing workshop. The common experience allows students to use their own memory to retell the story so that they do not have to make it up. Also, this common experience fosters a community since it is "our story," not the teacher's story. The activity supports students with lower levels of language because they have multiple opportunities to hear and practice the academic language in an authentic context related to a real-life experience. The opportunity to transfer the language to their own writing or re-tell is immediate. Finally, there are continuous opportunities to revisit the language throughout the week to firm up and expand the vocabulary. The Storytelling strategy is a great example of how ELD can be embedded into content outside of designated ELD time. Storytelling is also quite short, five to seven minutes, so it can be used right before a mini-lesson without being too intrusive.

Tensions and Areas for Further Inquiry: This activity is designed to support writing workshop, and is often done right before the mini-lesson. Could it also be done right before the mini-lesson for a Reading Workshop, and what might be some other genres you could use it with besides narrative? Could you do description of a character? Summarizing the big ideas and supporting details from a non-fiction piece? Compare and contrast two events or stories?