Hitomi Masuhara: They all have stories to tell: Helping learners to express themselves (Narrative in ELT Symposium)

Hitomi talked about her passion for using materials that help learners tell their stories. An example of such an activity is writing the so called ‘stem poems’, especially as a getting-to-know-your-students activity at the start of a course. The students are expected to produce poems by using the following stem:

I’ve never…
I’ve never…
I’ve never…
But I’ve always…

Hitomi expressed her disagreement with the teacher practice of supplying instant correction right after students produced a personal (potentially emotional) narrative, synonymising it with ‘punishment’. This addition produced a fourth P in the common PPP approach to teaching:

PPPP (presentation-practice-production-punishment)

She suggested another teaching model, instead:

EEEE (experience-express-enjoy-empowerment)

her main motivation for such an instructional ‘manoeuvre’ being her conviction that error correction should be practised only after a safe learning environment has been established.

She provided the following teaching tools which lend themselves to this EEE view of teaching/learning: stories, anecdotes, jokes, music, drama, creative writing, haiku:

e.g. A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

as well as the so called ‘photo haiku’ activities, where the teacher supplies the learners with a photograph for them to base their haiku poem on.

Before leaving the stage, Hitomi reiterated the key prerequisite for her EEE approach to learning– student readiness to learn, i.e. students who ‘want to learn, need to learn and are prepared to learn.’