Language Learning through Storytelling

In a CLIL environment we can use storytelling as a tool of communication´s development with children. In this post, I am going to explain you know about what I have learnt in class with Raquel Fernández, our teacher of this subject at the Centro Universitario Cardenal Cisneros and what I have explored by my own about this topic.

 

First of all, I am going to explain you a little bit what CLIL is. This term means Content and Language Integrated Learning and it refers to teaching subjects such as science, history and geography to students through a foreign language, created for the need to attend not only to the linguistic, content, communicative and cognitive components involved in this approach but also to intercultural factors.

Stories can prove to be effective tools for children to develop those essential principles involved within a CLIL approach that include not only language and content but also communication, cognition and culture. Stories, hence, can contain the key 4Cs to make any CLIL experience succeed (Coyle, 1990).

 

This week, I have learnt a new way of telling stories following CLIL and I discovered a children´s novelist called Michael Rosen, who is a British poet and author of 140 books.

 

Michael have some interpretations of his stories in youtube like that one, where I could appreciate that he is very onomatopoeic and very expressive making gestures and sounds representing his stories. It helps to develop the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing and we can use them with children. 

 

 

We´re going on a bear hunt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytc0U2WAz4s

 

After watching this video in class, we did one activity which consisted of representing the story of Michael Rosen – We´re going on a bear hunt.

First of all, the teacher divided the class into different groups, one group was the family who were going on a bear hunt, another group had to represent the grass, another group the river, etc., making the movements and sounds of these places and here you have the result:

 

 

My opinion about this activity is that we can use stories in a different way, is good for children to improve their reading skills but also is important to improve another kind of skills such as social skills or communication skills not only with their teacher but also with their peers, therefore, as a future teachers we should make an extra effort in order to integrate different skills in our activities. This allows them to construct knowledge and express ideas, even with the very limited language they may have at the early stages of a CLIL programme. Moreover, stories can help learners increase language fluency and advance in their content knowledge.