Brian Tomlinson: Exploiting the power of narrative (Narrative in ELT Symposium)

If we dream, daydream, love, hate, think, etc. by using narrative, one wonders why stories have been virtually banished from ELT course books. This is how Brian started his talk, adding that he understands ‘his ELT mission’ as one of bringing back narrative to ELT.

He shared a number of ways he uses stories in his classroom. The first one was by using ‘task-free activities’. Starting from the proposition that learners might be stressed/bored/indifferent when it comes to doing the usual reading comprehension activities, Brian tries to start his lessons with a 5-minute narrative performance. He always brings copies of the story he shares and invites students to get a copy of the narrative if they like, collect the stories in a portfolio, come back to them if they want, and ask questions, but they never be asked questions. He leaves it entirely up to the students’ curiosity to shape their learning-via-stories experience, encouraging them to revisit the text from time to time.

He also advocated the text-driven approach to learning, where instead of planning a lesson with a teaching point in mind, the teacher starts the lesson with an engaging text and then teaches any language that naturally emerges and seems to be useful to the students. He broke down the text-driven activity in the following sub-parts:
- a readiness activity – serves to ready the mind for the story (via imagination, personal guesses about characters/setting, etc.)
- initial response activity – learners make inferences about aspects of the text
- intake response activity – the learners articulate their personal response to the text task; learners go back to the text and use what they’ve discovered in the narrative (e.g. vocabulary, structures, etc.)

Brian also shared his experience of using ‘soap opera’ activities with his students. He asks them to get into groups. The first group write up, act out and film their 5-minute soap opera. Each next group produces a new ‘instalment’ of the soap opera. His class, for example, finished the course with a 45-minute soap opera to keep as memorabilia from the course.

With another class, he motivated the students to engage in a class novel writing. In activities like this, the learners produce all the language they want to use and teaching takes place as needs emerge. Brian reported his students’ interest in this writing activity, suggesting that motivation flourishes when the learners’ creativity is stimulated.

He rounded off the symposium by summarising the findings of a recent research: the more bizarre the classroom content, the better the quality the learning experience.