Storytelling aneb proč si trošku neprocvičit angličtinu

STORYTELLING

I would like to tell you about an interesting activity I have been doing with my students recently. In one of our conversation lessons we were focusing on storytelling. At the end of the lesson, I asked my students to take a sheet of paper and write down a random activity. It didn’t matter what they would write. Actually, the crazier the better. When they wrote down words such as jogging, crying, rafting or reading a book, I asked them to fold the paper so that their neighbour couldn’t see what they had written. We sent the paper to the person sitting on their right and the whole process repeated. This time they were asked to write a place. Then, on another sheet they wrote a name of a famous person, a thing, and, finally, a question. When we looked at the sheets, it was quite funny to read the results. One of the sheets contained the following words: Walking, in a deep forest, Sherlock Holmes, a mobile phone, Will you marry me? Of course, that was not the end of the task. I asked them to make a story containing all the words from the sheet and at the same time use linking words which we had learned in the lesson. Next week I received really long and interesting stories which were as much fun reading as I suppose they were writing.

Here are a few examples:

A pre-intermediate student wrote:

One sunny day I met a man! He was very strange. The man started to talk with me. “Hello girl, I´m John Travolta.“ It was funny for me, because the man didn´t look like John Travolta. The man didn´t wait for my reply and continued.“ I bought a new red car – FERRARI. Do you like it?“ Again he didn´t wait for my reply and said:“ If you want, we can go skiing today by my new red car.“ I kept laughing, but the man continued! Skiing will be a big change for me, because I have lived in a dangerous jungle for 20 years. Now I laughed again. The man said: “What´s up?“ A few minutes later I understood… An ambulance stopped in front of us and several men in white cloaks caught „John Travolta“ and took him to hospital – PSYCHIATRY!!!!!

An intermediate student wrote:

Last year, president Miloš Zeman visited our city of Ostrava. I was really lucky because I was chosen to make an interview with him about his leisure time and hobbies. He told me that he liked doing sports, particularly cycling. However, the most adventurous experience he has ever done was diving in a very deep sea. He is a really clever man and that´s why he likes reading books as well. His favourite book is a story about Ferda Mravenec. During reading he always eats his favourite sweet sauce and his wife must cook it for him very often. Sometimes he helps her in the kitchen.

After our interview he asked me if I knew when the first train to Prague goes. He needed to be at an important appointment and he prefers going by train to going by car.

…And there were a lot of funny and adventurous stories from advanced students, too, but they were so long that nobody wanted to type them because it would take too much time. Next time I am going to ask them to type their essays straightaway. J