During the work on the reversible sentences, the students become involved in some of the themes that they may later see in the story. The story comes as a gloss on the personal opinions the students have previously expressed on some of its themes.

During telling

What follows is an idea for allowing each student individually to build his own story from a common skeleton supplied to the group by the teacher. This is how it works: Ask the students to prepare to take dictation. Then dictate:

The man went to the window and looked

out.

Ask the students to write a couple of sentences of their own describing the man. Dictate:

Down in the garden he saw a unicorn munching lilies.

Ask them to describe the garden; as they write, go around the room, helping and correcting. Dictate:

He went back to his wife, woke her up and
said: "There's a unicorn in the garden
munching lilies," to which she replied:
"There can't be, the unicorn is a mythical
beast."

Ask them to describe the wife.
Dictate:

The man went down to take a closer look at the unicorn, but when he got there it had vanished. He sat down on a bench and went to sleep. He had a dream. Ask them to write his dream. Dictate:

His wife telephoned the psychiatrist and
told him to come quickly with a straitjacket
and a policeman.

Ask them to describe the psychiatrist.
Dictate:

The psychiatrist came and asked the man:
"Did you see a unicorn in the garden
munching lilies?" to which the man replied:
"Of course not, the unicorn is a mythical
beast."

Ask the students to finish the story any way they like.

(after Thurber, "The Unicorn in the Garden")

By this point, there is considerable curiosity to see what other people have written as they imagined the man, his wife, the psychiatrist, etc. Pair the students off and ask them to read their stories as feelingly as they can to each other. Let them re-pair several times.

Another way to achieve this collaborative telling is to do it in the lab. You speak the italicized sentences above onto the master tracks of the student machines; they speak their individual descriptions onto their student tracks. For the communicative phase, they play "musical booths," swapping positions and listening to each other's oral stories.

Mario Rinvolucri started out in post-college life as a journalist and converted to teaching while

stationed in Greece. Since then, he has taught English in Chile and in Cambridge and Canterbury. England. His present job, which is for Pilgrims Language Courses, takes him hither and thither in Western Europe, directing in-service training seminars. He has coauthored a number of books, the most recent of which is Challenge to Think (Oxford University Press. 1982).

I have used this collaborative storytelling a lot at the lower intermediate level, and it is particularly rich with mixed-nationality classes in an English-speaking environment. I could analyze its richness at length, but the best way for you to find out more is to try it with a group. Your subsequent analysis will rightly interest you a lot more than mine would.

After telling

a

To have to retell a story you have just heard to someone else who has also just heard it simply because you are lower intermediate in the target language and because the teacher wants you to practice common irregular verbs is, from a communicational point of view, very odd undertaking. If you simply repeat the same form of words, more or less as you heard them, this denies the creative, interpretive, additive work you did as you listened and made the story your own. As people listen, they add all sorts of things that the storyteller has no chance of even guessing at, things drawn from their own perception, memory, and subconscious. The storyteller mentions a cave, and one student sees a cathedral-like opening with a fir tree rising up before it, while another sees a badger hole from the viewpoint of himself as a six-yearold.

I am here reporting student perceptions of the word cave that I used in telling a group a particular story. Had I asked these students to simply retell my form of the story, they would have failed to communicate what they had actually experienced in its real richness.

Follow-up exercises ought to draw the students into exploring their relationship with the substance of what they heard, as happens in the exercise below: In class:

1. Tell your group the story of Rumpelstiltskin.

2. Give the students the geometric shapes

and adjectives below and ask them to decide, working on their own, which shapes represent which characters-miller, king, daughter, Rumpelstiltskin,

baby. Also ask them to decide which adjectives go with which character. 3. Pair the students and get them to explain their choices to one another.

So far I have dwelt on techniques around storytelling, but the heart of this sort of exercise is the telling itself. Very few English teachers-indeed, very few people are good at reading aloud in their own language. To do this properly takes both acting talent and a fairly severe technical training.

Most of us, though, seem to be able to tell stories orally. Styles vary enormously from teller to teller, and they also depend on the sort of audience the teller has. Some people will tell a story with riveting eye contact and much gesture. Such tellings are halfway to becoming one-person plays. Others will tell stories with no eye contact, very quietly, very inwardly, as if they were telling the story in, rather than out. Such tellings, in which the audience seems to be looking over the teller's

shoulder, rather than facing him, can be more powerful than the dramatic type.

I find that when I tell a story like Goldilocks to a group of lower-intermediate German businessmen, they and I are sucked into roles, parental on my side and childhood-returning on their side, which create a completely new place out of the classroom for the duration of the activity.

You almost certainly have your own way of telling. Find stories you like-subconsciously like-interiorize them, don't word-for-word memorize them, and tell them in the way that comes most naturally. Once you have established your way, strike out and try other styles. You can tell the same story in all sorts of modes, drawing many different moods from different members of your audience.2

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bettelheim, Bruno. 1978. The uses of enchantment. London: Penguin.

Opie, Iona and Peter. 1974. The classic fairy tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Propp, Vladimir. 1968. The morphology of the folktale. London: Austin.

Rodari, Gianni. 1973. Grammatica della fantasia. Turin: Einaudi.

2. If you'd like a selection of seventy story outlines and a wide range of new exercises to work on around storytelling. you could do worse than have a look at Once Upon a Time. available from Pilgrims. 8 Vernon Place. Canterbury.

IATEFL Conference

The 17th International Conference of the In

ternational Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language will be held 5-8 April 1983 at St. Mary's College, Twickenham, Middlesex, England. The theme will be "Moti es and Incentives for the Learning of TEFL/TESL." Accommodation is available in the Halls of Residence from 4-9 April. Registration forms and details are available from the IATEFL Executive Officer, Mrs. B.I. Thomas, 87 Bennells Avenue, Tankerton, Whitstable, Kent, England CT5 2HR.

GREECE

Growing Up in English Class

OLGA JULIUS and GEORGIA MARKETOS Deree-Pierce Colleges

Interest in literature these days seems to run far behind a more animated interest in disco music, designer jeans, and the dernier cri in sports for most junior-high-school students. English teachers are constantly searching for ways to bring students and literature closer to

Reprinted from English Language Arts Bulletin, 22. (Winter 1981-82) by permission of the authors and the Ohio Council of Teachers of English.

Olga Julius teaches English to ninth-grade girls, in addition to being the chairman of the English Department at Pierce College in Athcns. She presented an EFL workshop at the 1979 NE/SA conference held in Rhodes and was the teacher representative from Pierce College at the 1981 NE/SA conference in Crete. Ms. Julius received a post-baccalaureate degree in cducation (1974) from Malone College in Canton, Ohio. She has also studied at the University of Fribourg in Fribourg, Switzerland.

Georgia Marketos teaches English as a foreign language to seventh- and ninth-grade girls

and American literature to advanced tenth-grade girls at Pierce College in Athens. Greece. She has had several EFL articles published. In 1980, she made a presentation at the first TESOLGreece convention, and has presented workshops in NE/SA conferences held in Rhodes

and Crete. Ms. Marketos, a native of Ohio, rcceived her M.A. in linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1976.

gether. An approach which almost always works satisfactorily is a thematic unit, based on a theme familiar to the student and "rele

vant" to him, followed by a learner-oriented task which requires the student to produce something.

We have had excellent results working with ninth graders teaching a thematic unit on "Growing Up." The literature includes two short stories, two poems, and a novel:

"Sixteen," Maureen Daly
"Araby," James Joyce

"Little Black Boy," William Blake
"My Lost Youth," Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow

A Separate Peace, John Knowles.

The literature is varied, appeals to boys and girls, and deals with the complex psychological stress involved in growing up as well as the lighter and more enjoyable aspects. A fourweek period allotted to reading and discussing the literature in class was followed by a two-week stretch for working on the assigned project.

The aims of our project were three: 1. to have students use the knowledge they acquired from the discussions and literature readings;

2. to expand their understanding of poetry and poetic analysis:

3. to further expose students to the library and its research facilities. We prepared the students by giving them a

detailed handout on poetry analysis, which we read, explained, and discussed with them in class. The following day, students received a list of American and British poets (partly to quell the voices of those who "don't know any poets"), and the assignment:

1. Each of you is required to find five poems by five different poets dealing with youth, growing up, or old age looking back on youth. Try to limit the poems to thirty lines.

2. Before you begin working with the poems, check with your teacher to make sure no classmate has chosen the same poems. (The teacher keeps a master list to avoid duplication-there are so many poems on this subject that it would be foolish to have two or more students working with the same poem.)

3. Copy each poem neatly on a separate piece of paper.

4. Under the poem (if it is short), or on the back (if it is long), you will do two things:

a) In your own words, write a short biography of the poet, highlighting the important things in his life, both personal and literary.

b) Write a good, coherent paragraph analyzing the theme of the poem. 5. On (a given date) you will hand in your five poems with the supplementary material. This poetry project began as an individual effort, since each student worked by himself. but then became a class project. This came about when one student suggested that after each collection had been marked and graded by the teacher-and corrected and rewritten by the students-it could be assembled into a volume. A few class members worked on a title page, a table of contents, and a dedication. The entire collection was then xeroxed. so that each student could have his own copy.

This particular teaching unit has been very successful in our classes, because the theme is always fun to deal with and easy for juniorhigh students to relate to. Aside from that. the accumulation of everyone's work into a volume makes each student proud to see his own efforts included in the "published" work.

INDIA

The Role of Literature in the Study
of Language

RATHINDRANATH CHATTOPADHYAY
Krishnagar Government College,
West Bengal

Those who have been teaching English literature in schools and colleges have frequently felt, as Dr. Helen W. Power did. that the students seldom possess a clear idea of the rela

tionship between literature and language.' The fault lies with the teachers who do not take the trouble to explain that language is not opposed to literature (in the way that science is) and that the study of language can never be complete without a proper appreciation of the literary works in that language. The same is true of literature: it is impossible to understand the literature of a country without having control over the language of that country.

Pope's famous couplet runs:

True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd. And Hudson, in his popular book An Introduction to the Study of Literature, writes, "Literature is a vital record of what men have seen in life, what they have experienced of it, what they have thought and felt about those aspects of it which have the most immediate and enduring interest for all of us. It is thus fundamentally an expression of life through the medium of language" (6th Indian ed., 1975).

It is obvious from the above extracts that the study of the language of a country is of prime importance; unfortunately, however, what is not obvious to many teachers of language is the fact that language is not an end in itself, but a means which must lead the learner to the study of the literature written in that language. The reverse is also true, and one's literary appreciation can never be complete without a thorough knowledge of the language.

This must have been in the mind of Sonia Zyngier when she asked, "How can your students read and understand Shakespeare or Wordsworth, especially if they do not have full command of the language?"? In the same manner, one may ask, "What is the use of learning a language without having the opportunity to appreciate the literary works in that language?"

Education and life

George Eliot once said that art (and, of course, literature, which is a part of art) "is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot." This is one way of saying that a careful study of literature will enable us to know life better. What, really, does a man know of life? He knows his own life, he may know the lives of a hundred persons. But life is surely bigger and broader than that, and literature helps a man to be acquainted with the broader perspective. Marcus Aurelius said, "Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under the observation in

1. Helen W. Power. "Literature for Language Students." English Teaching Forum, 19, 1 (January 1981).

2. Sonia Zyngier. "Teaching Literature to Undergraduate EFL Students." English Teaching Forum, 19, 1. p. 33.

life" (Modern Eloquence, vol. XIV). It is the careful study of literature that broadens the mind and enables one to formulate "the ability to investigate systematically."

Keeping in mind the fact that a knowledge of life is the aim of the study of literature, as well as of language, we must now try to understand the implications of what the late Albert Marckwardt, in his wonderful article "What Literature to Teach: Principles of Selection and Class Treatment," regarded as "the broad goals of education." This eminent teacher wrote: "Indeed, the broad goals of education are much the same, namely, a concern for stimulating and feeding a life of the intellect and for developing a humaneness and sensitivity beyond purely practical and Vocational concerns." 993 An echo of this sentiment can be found in Thomas Huxley: "Education promotes peace by teaching men the realities of life and the obligations which are involved in the very existence of society; it promotes intellectual development, not only by training intellect, but by sifting out from the masses of ordinary or inferior capacities, those who are competent to increase the general welfare by occupying higher positions; and lastly, it promotes morality and refinement, by teaching men to discipline themselves, and by leading them to see that the highest, as it is the only permanent, content is to be attained, not by groveling in the rank and steaming valleys of sense, but by continual striving towards those high peaks, where, resting in eternal calm, reason discerns the undefined but bright ideal of the highest good a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night'" (Modern Eloquence, vol. XIV). According to Huxley, that man alone has a liberal education "whose mind is stored with the

knowledge of the great fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations." It is this "mind" that has to be explored, and that cannot be done without the combined efforts of language and literature.

Is "bazaar language" enough?

In many countries where English is taught as a second language, the tendency appears to be to minimize the importance of literature. The result is pernicious. English in those countries has come down to the level of "bazaar language"--the language of the market. I believe that the teachers themselves are responsible for this sad degradation of the richest and most powerful language in the world. It is their bounden duty to teach both the students and the formulators of the curricula that English literature is extremely varied and that there are wonderful literary works suitable for students of all age groups and classes. We have been teaching Dickens' David Copperfield at the honors level, and an abridged ver

3. Albert H. Marckwardt. "What Literature to Teach: Principles of Selection and Class Treatment." English Teaching Forum, 19, 1. p. 4.

sion of the same book at the higher secondary (classes XI-XII) level. If a boy of fifteen or sixteen cannot understand Macbeth, there is no reason why he cannot be asked to study Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb. Contrary to what many scholars teach us, it is my firm belief that we should acquaint our children with the best books containing rich thoughts at an early age. Those who can understand stories by Enid Blyton and Alfred Hitchcock can very well understand abridged versions of stories by Dickens, Scott, and Jane Austen.

What kind of language?

This brings me to the last point of my discussion the question of the language. What sort of language should be helpful to a beginner? According to Marckwardt, "There is little or nothing to be gained from subjecting the student to archaic forms of the language, obsolescent meanings of words, and subject matter that requires historical interpretation." It is an acknowledged fact that there is nothing simpler and more beautiful than the language of the English Bible, and the begin

ner must gain a mastery over this kind of language. Teachers, at this stage, must avoid ornamental and bombastic language. Is there any sense in asking a boy of thirteen or fourteen to grasp the meaning of Sir Isaac Newton is the developer of the skies in their embodied movements or the proverbial oracles of our parsimonious ancestors? Nor should the students be asked to learn verbose expressions, known as "journalese"; it is useless to ask a child to understand The spirit quitted its earthly habitation and winged its way to eternity. It is, often, this sort of ridiculous language that frightens a child and makes him an enemy of the English language.

JAPAN

Reading a Story Aloud to a Class
TOMOO TSUKAMOTO

Dokkyo University, Saitama

If you sometimes have difficulty getting students' attention, I suggest that you read a story aloud to your class. This may not prove to be a panacea, especially if carelessly done, but if you prepare conscientiously, I believe you will find it useful.

In any language class, be it a reading or a conversation class, the teacher must see that his students have ample opportunity to develop balanced language skills. Reading a short story aloud to a class can help them develop

the following:

1. Listening skills, as they listen to the story read by their teacher.

2. Speaking skills, when they are engaged in pre- and post-listening pair work. 3. Writing skills, when they write down what they think will happen in the next installment of the story.

4. Rapid reading skills, when, after listening to the story, they are asked to read rapidly.

5. A positive attitude toward reading in general.

Reading materials

From the many supplementary readers at hand, you should choose one for which the original text is also readily available, so that you can use both the simplified version and the original text. Handouts

For each class period there ought to be four different kinds of handouts: (1) basic facts about each installment of the chosen story, such as location, time and date, and main characters; (2) the text of each installment, to be given to the students after the first listening; (3) pre-listening questions, to be passed around before the students listen to the story; (4) post-listening questions, to check their general comprehension.

Day 1

1. Before giving the students a copy of the text, present the title of the story either orally or in written form. Encourage them to make wild guesses about what the story will be like. You should solicit as many responses as possible, for the important thing here is to put them into a state of anticipation before they actually listen to or read the story.

2. The first handout gives the basic facts of Installment 1 of the story. Pre-listening questions may be given at this point (see the Appendix). Students may consult each other about the questions so that they will be able to make educated guesses. They should be en

Tomoo Tsukamoto received his undergraduate degree from Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo and his M.S. in Education at Indiana University in Bloomington. He has been teaching English at various levels in Tokyo since he returned to Japan. "Most of my college classes are general arts courses intended for non-English majors," he writes. "I wrote the present article with this in mind."

couraged to speak English when they talk to the teacher feels it is fitting or necessary, the each other, but in some situations in which use of the students' native language may be allowed. A variation is to have the students think of a number of questions in English and discuss them among themselves.

3. The teacher reads Installment 1 aloud to the class. Some teachers may prefer to use recorded material. My experience shows, however, that it is much better for the teacher, native or nonnative, to read the story himself than to rely on the mechanical voice on the tape. It is far more interesting for students to listen to a live person than to a "dead" machine. They will enjoy listening to your story if you read it with appropriate facial expressions, funny, sad, happy, or threatening, as the context demands. One caution: the teacher must make the students feel as if they are being talked to rather than read to. An otherwise fascinating story can become deadly boring in the hands of a careless, unprepared presenter. Concerning the technique of reading aloud, Michael West has the following advice: "Glance down at the book, gather up an 'eyeful' of six to ten words, then say them to the class in such a way as to establish a rapport just as if one were talking to an audience" (West 1967:141).

4. Post-listening questions are now given. 5. A second listening (or reading aloud). 6. The students now get a copy of the text and are told to read it silently within a specified amount of time. The objective is to help them learn to read quickly.

7. A true-false quiz is given orally or in written form (see the Appendix).

8. The students write down a few lines tell

ing what they think will happen in the next installment. This may be done in class or as a homework assignment. Day 2 and onward

1. A brief review of the previous installment, just to remind the students of its main points.

2. Before they listen to the new installment the students discuss how this installment will develop, using their notes from the previous lesson.

3. The other procedures are the same as on Day 1.

4. On the last day, the students read the original version of the story on which the simplified text is based. They should not have much difficulty in reading it, since they have listened to and read the story in a rewritten, easier form. You may want to give a written or oral final test to complete the activity.

APPENDIX

I. Excerpts (first paragraphs) from the simplified text and the original text:

1. Easy text-"A Watcher by the Dead," in Short Stories by Ambrose Bierce:

In an upper room of an unoccupied dwelling in San Francisco lay the body of a man, under a sheet. The time was nearly nine in the evening: the room was dimly lighted by a single candle. Although the weather was warm, the two windows were closed. The furniture of the room consisted of a large chair, a small reading stand holding the candle, and a long table, supporting the body of the man. All these, including the body, seemed to have been recently brought in. An observer would have seen that all were free from dust, although everything else in the room was dusty....

2. Original text-"A Watcher by the Dead" in In the Midst of Life: A Selection:

In an upper room of an unoccupied dwelling in the part of San Francisco known as North Beach lay the body of a man, under a sheet. The hour was near nine in the evening; the room was dimly lighted by a single candle. Although the weather was warm, the two windows, contrary to the custom which gives the dead plenty of air. were closed and the blinds drawn down. The furniture of the room consisted of but three pieces an armchair, a small reading-stand supporting the candle, and a long kitchen table. supporting the body of the man. All these, also the corpse, seemed to have been recently brought in, for an observer, had there been one. would have seen that all were free from dust. whereas everything else in the room was pretty thickly coated with it, and there were cobwebs in the angles of the walls. . . . II. Handouts: Installment 1 1. Basic facts of Installment 1:

Title: "A Watcher by the Dead"
Location: An upper room of an unoccu-
pied dwelling in San Francisco
Scene: A dead body is in the center of the
room. A man enters.

Time: Nearly nine in the evening 2. Pre-listening questions:

Instruction: Use your imagination and try
to answer the following questions.
a. Who do you think is dead?

b. Is the body that of a man or a woman?
c. Does the man who enters the room
know the dead person?

d. What does the man come into the room for?

3. Post-listening questions:

a. Was the room bright?