Story-Listening 1.5
Before we get into this, let me just get this out of the way - I’m sorry for the click-bait title. I’m actually NOT Nostradamus and have no idea what Story-Listening will look like in 5 minutes, let alone 5 years. Also let me apologize in advance to Dr Beniko Mason and Dr Stephen Krashen, for marring your name with my casual approach to academics and teaching in general. I’m pretty aware of how things SHOULD be done, I’m just not a fan of following conventions (but sometimes this can be a good thing). If by chance you’ve stumbled across this and don’t know about Story-Listening, please go to Dr Mason’s website if you would like to see how it is done properly. This whole post is just to mull over a little of what I’m exploring and where the method might go in the future. With that all said and done, click away or lets get into it!
Just recently Blaine Ray released some information regarding something he is calling TPRS 2.0. Actually I think it might have been out for a while, I can’t tell, anyway I’m not planning on talking about TPRS 2.0, but it did get me thinking - what will Dr Beniko Mason and Dr Stephen Krashen’s Story-Listening look like in a few years time? What might a Story-Listening 1.5 look like?
I feel like I was pretty late to the party with Comprehensible Input and I wasn’t even born at the start of the “40 Years’ War”. Having said this, I’ve been teaching through CI for a little while now and I was very fortunate to have gotten in on the ground floor of Story-Listening. If I can stick it out in this profession, its possible I’ll still be teaching in 10, 20 or even 40 years time (ohhh Lordy!). And I think that in 2064, Story-Listening wouldn’t and probably shouldn’t look the same as it does today (although who knows if teachers will even exist then, right? I know I know… people have probably been saying this since the 70s too).
So I’m going to speculate a little as to how it might change and if I’m still paying the upkeep on this website in 20 years time, you can come back and laugh at my predictions (again). On that note, lets get into my predictions:
You still got a while, go get a coffee. I’ll have one while you’re up :)
Story-Listening 1.5 Prediction Number 1: Increased Ambience
When you tell or ask a story at the front of the room, you don’t realize it but you’re being compared with the interest of every content creator on Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube ever. There is a beautiful quaintness to doing your own drawings in a story, something the students probably won’t have seen a lot of. While we don’t have camera filters, I have seen some teachers, such as Annabelle Williams (La Maestra Loca), incorporate the use of background music to set the mood for their stories though. This is such an easy addition and in my experience, it really helps students get into the ‘zone’, particularly when it aligns with a compelling story. It also makes the boundaries of any given task clear, Pavlov-like, I noticed my students settle into their seats and listen in when the music started (minus the salivating of course).
Interestingly, I’ve also found that music can also change the flavour of a story, kinda obvious I know, but still worth a mention. Take Story One from The Story Pit (see below), I read my students this story (in Japanese) and some classes heard it with music and some heard it without. It was actually the very first story they heard in my class and afterwards, I got them to do a summary in English and then a prediction of what they thought was behind the door. A lot of my stories, particularly short-stories, drop students straight into a situation and often leave them asking/wanting more, so I feel like the addition of a prediction to the summary made a lot of sense. It also is like an additional comprehension check, if you know what I mean. Anyway, back to my point, the students who had the music (see the actual music below) were noticeably more focused during the story - they seemed more invested, you know? Having said this, their predictions for what was behind the door were significantly ‘darker’ than their non-music peers. There were plenty of murder dungeons, monsters and endless mazes. I could see myself experimenting with different background music to evoke different types of summaries from my students - it would also be fun to read student summaries from different classes afterwards. And while I’m aware, that Dr Beniko Mason has made her position on horror stories clear, I’m actually not guilty of writing a scary story here, it was just the ambience. Besides, I’m going to side with Stephen K on this one, no not Dr Stephen Krashen, Stephen King.
I’ll paraphrase King from his 1981 essay “Why we crave Horror Movies”, but he basically outlines that there is a little insanity in everyone, except some people just hide it better than others. We celebrate some emotions, like love, kindness and friendship, but other emotions like fear, anger are supressed, but that doesn’t make them go away. They’re still a part of everyone and we need a place to exercise these feelings. Personally, I feel it’s part of the reason those places where you can throw plates on the ground and smash TV’s with baseball bats exist.
Taken from the yet to be released English version of The Story Pit (The Japanese version is available already though).
It would be interesting to see in the future a classroom job where a selected student could pre-read the story and select music and sound-effects for the upcoming story. Classroom jobs are a well-established component of CI classrooms and I imagine that students would scramble over each other at the possibility of reading the story in advance and setting up a soundboard with music and sound-effects (I know I would have). I’d also be very interested to see the changes you could evoke in student feelings through simple changes in the ambience, I mean there’s got to be a good a reason why we sit in dark movie theatres and people tell stories around campfires at night right?
Story-Listening 1.5 Prediction Number 2 : Visual Supplementation
I’m working on some pretty funky stories at the moment and while I know drawing in Story-Listening is its own important element, I absolutely hate drawing some things on the spot. It isn’t because I lack the skill, time or ability to draw simple objects for the story, rather its because my classes are basically like the ocean, I can never turn my back on them. Don’t draw everything and keep it simple I hear you say - I know I know, but sometimes I can’t help how I feel! You can see some examples of how I draw in the classroom from the story above and below, look for the inexplicably crappier drawings in each image. This is where supplementation could come in, which I think could constitute another form of Comprehension-aiding supplementation (CAS).
With this particular story, I felt there would be merit to having some of the ‘assets’ ready to go, pre-loaded if you will. In fact, you can see in the image above how I had it ready to go. It meant I could ‘look and discuss’ straight off the bat and a picture of the story had immediately formed in their mind and together with some Star Trek TNG music I had lined up, they weren’t just going into the story blind. Could one consider their comprehension was aided? Maybe even supplemented a little? It didn’t even hurt that the weapon, engines and shields HUD was upside-down.
I think there is a place for some pre-drawn assets, overusing them would be unnecessary but if it is the scaffold that the teacher needs to tell the story, then I see them as being welcomed additions. After all, (huge sweeping statement incoming) any CI lesson is better than none right? While this isn’t license to do anything I like in a CI class, I can’t be the only one who gets a little nervous launching into a story… I found having the images there gave me confidence and it truly was a form of mutual scaffolding. One thing I will say though is, having one asset amongst a whiteboard/chalkboard of hand-drawn images might seem out of place and similarly, you could easily over do this, at which point you’re almost doing picture-talk.
Again, this is from the yet to be released English version of The Story Pit.
Now before you say, wait Richard you told this to you class? This isn’t Story-Listening!? This is Paragraph-Listening!! Where is the rest of the story? My whole book is a little on the experimental side of things, I firmly believe there is a place for flash-fiction in Story-Listening classrooms (Prediction 2.5?) and I recommend you download The Story Pit sample-edition and read the introduction where I explain why (I think I do anyway… Maybe I left that part up to David Lynch). Now lets move onto something with a little more teeth, as this story is the perfect segue to…
Story-Listening 1.5 Prediction Number 3: Student agency, a beautiful TPRS and Story-Listening Love-Child
When I completed Story Five in class, I stopped the music, put on my timer and asked my students to immediately start their summary. However, what I wasn’t expecting was backlash. This particular class was one of my senior classes, but the last time I taught them was back in 2021. I was still teaching primarily through TPRS at that time, so my students expecting that it was now time to move into co-creation part of the lesson, given the choices at the end of the story. Which really made me wonder… could a meld of TPRS and Story-Listening even work? I mean of course it could right? We do them independently of each other. The example story above was basically the ‘primer’ for it, the exposition and rising action. While neither idea is original in itself and I’m sure there’s plenty of people out there doing this already, I found the idea fascinating.
We continued the story in more of a TPRS style and the students became invested in the crew of the small ship (excuse the chicken-scratch writing, it doesn’t get any better in English either) but things went from bad to worse as their plans to attack the incoming vessel were fruitless, cornered and without any other option, the class went as far as to tap into the power-core they were smuggling. This activity became very much a co-creation, students were not sheltered and student output became necessary. My students had the benefit of prior TPRS experience, but I imagine not all classes could adapt so quickly. They aren’t that similar despite appearing that way, Story-Listening is more like TPRS’s cousin not sibling, if you catch my drift.
Which takes me to my next point, perhaps student agency doesn’t necessarily mean TPRS. What about a form gamified reading that existed for ages, that melds story-telling and role-playing game elements - Like the old Choose Your Own Adventure CYOA), Fighting Fantasy (FF) and Lone Wolf Series. These types of stories offer a wealth of established texts that fit the bill and having read a few myself in my time, they aren’t particularly complex and would translate easily. There is something special about these types of books and they potentially could lend themselves very well and greatly broaden a teachers catalogue of stories. I feel like the mini-sections a CYOA book is broken up into, lends themselves well to a long-form story, because you could start it in the second-half of a lesson and then stop it at any time. Also at the end of each section there is usually a choice, which would make for a good opportunity to ‘circle’ the situation from your illustrations and ensure everyone was on the same page (pun intended). And lastly, the choice means involvement and investment and intrigue. I say intrigue, because the choice you make as a class may not necessarily be what every student wants to do. Meaning they might be compelled to go off and explore the book on their own - my dream scenario. While we’re on the topic of gamified learning, there are some groups of teachers and academics which already explore this area, they are called Ludic Language Pedagogy. In fact, looking at their work I would say this is very well-trodden ground.
Could something like the House of Danger CYOA offer students the opportunity listen and act?
I’ve probably written enough haven’t I? I bet as soon as I publish this all the other ideas I had will flood in… I could sit around and write more, but I’ve got other things to do. Forgive me for only playing around the edges of what a Story-Listening 1.5 could look like and thank you for humouring me. Because this feels very half-assed, let me steer into that and list a few lazy dot points to round this all off. Story-Listening could eventually:
Have new variations in how we summarize and evaluate at the end of a story, or possibly not do this at all?
Have variations to the actual process itself. Like the removal of the prompter in favour of something else? Refinements, reductions or increases in the amount of illustrations based on research.
Be a mixture of Story-Listening ‘primer’ stories into TPRS sessions capitalize on the best of both world?
See new potential methods for assessment, perhaps the recommendation of a total reduction to maintain student affective-filters?
Contain further use of AI. It is already being used by some teachers to develop stories and break them down into prompters, it will undoubtedly play some part in the future.
Progress into more specialized professional development, which is something I’m really looking forward to seeing (not doing, no thanks).
Sorry if you feel like I’m just describing what you’re already doing or see happening - in teaching I have a knack for suggesting things only to have people turn around say that isn’t anything new. I do try and keep my ear close to the ground but to be honest, it would seem most teachers are so focused on trying to wrap their heads around legacy teaching methods, they don’t even know about vanilla Story-Listening or let alone speculating where it might head in the future.
Bonus Story-Listening 1.5 Prediction Number 4: Story-Listening 2.0
Having said everything so far, could there ever actually be something like a Story-Listening 2.0? To me, 2.0 suggests a total reinvention and that seems unlikely to me at this point. I mean, stories and story-telling are as old as time and I don’t think there is any reinventing this wheel - at best all I’ve done is slap on some plastic rims and tire black. The more you add to Story-Listening, the closer it moves towards becoming something else entirely.
I suppose we’ll see in time though. I’m perfectly content with the approach so far, but it doesn’t hurt to speculate. Feel free to suggest some of your own ideas on the Bakemono Classroom Facebook page.
