Questions from a Teacher Who Is New to Story-Listening

A teacher who is new to Story-Listening recently asked me a number of questions. The teacher is thinking about how Story-Listening might fit into a Korean program and wanted to know where to begin. I thought other teachers might have similar questions, so I am sharing my answers here.

I think the question-and-answer format is a useful way of explaining some important aspects of Story-Listening and Pure Optimal Unified Input (P.O.U.I.) in practical terms.

First, About the Next Steps

1. Should I tell one story a day as a regular part of the class and not assign related output activities?

If you would like to explore Story-Listening as I have practiced and researched it, yes, that would be the direction I would suggest.

My work began with a very basic question raised by Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis: Are language acquisition and conscious language learning different processes, and, if so, is comprehensible input the cause of language acquisition? Is input sufficient for acquisition without requiring students to practice speaking and writing?

Many teachers accept the importance of comprehensible input but still believe that input alone is not sufficient. They therefore combine input with vocabulary study, grammar instruction, speaking practice, writing, correction, and other skill-building activities.

But this raises an important question. If comprehensible input is the cause of language acquisition, as the Input Hypothesis proposes, and output is not the cause of acquisition, why do we need to add required output activities to an acquisition-based method? This was one of the questions I wanted to investigate in my own teaching and research.

The combination of input and output (subconscious acquisition and conscious learning) is an eclectic, skills-based approach. In fact, virtually all traditional language-teaching approaches contain some comprehensible input. The important question is whether the additional conscious-learning and output activities are necessary for acquisition and whether the time spent on them could be used more effectively by providing more high-quality comprehensible input.

This is the question I have been investigating in my classroom research for many years.

2. What should I do with the remainder of a 50-minute class?

A Story-Listening session itself may take about 30 minutes. Even a story that is only about 150 words long in its written form can provide material for a 30-minute Story-Listening session. You are not simply reading or reciting those 150 words. As you tell the story, you make it comprehensible through explanations, paraphrases, drawings, gestures, and additional comments, while continuing to use the target language as much as possible. In this way, a very short story can generate a substantial amount of rich, comprehensible input.

Afterward, you can ask the students to write in English what they understood from the story. (I am assuming here that the students are English-speaking learners of Korean.)

Collect their summaries and keep them in an individual folder for each student. Remember that these summaries are primarily feedback to you: they show you how successfully you made the Korean comprehensible. At the same time, they can serve as a means of evaluating the students' comprehension for that day or week, depending on how frequently your school requires you to evaluate students. Over time, the collection of summaries provides a record of the development of each student's listening comprehension and can be used for formative evaluation.

After the Story-Listening session (we call it a "session," rather than a "lesson," following Dr. Krashen's suggestion), you can give the students the written version of the story they have just heard. If they are ready to read Korean independently, let them read it on their own. If they are not yet ready to read it independently, you can read it aloud while they follow the text.

Exactly what you do will depend on your students' level. The stories you choose to tell, as well as the type and difficulty of the written texts you give them to read, should be appropriate for their current level of comprehension.

This is what I mean by P.O.U.I.: auditory input through Story-Listening and written input through reading support each other. The long-term goal is to help students become independent, self-selecting readers of Korean while their listening competence is also developing.

The success of Story-Listening also depends greatly on the teacher. Choosing the right story, preparing it carefully, knowing how to make difficult parts comprehensible, observing the listeners' faces and reactions, sensing when they are following and when they are beginning to lose the thread, and adjusting the telling immediately all require skill. These abilities develop with preparation, experience, and practice.

This is also why I do not believe that a Story-Listening teacher can simply be replaced by AI. Story-Listening is not the delivery of a prepared story or script. A skilled teacher is constantly responding to the listeners in the room: slowing down or moving ahead, adding a drawing or gesture, choosing a different word or explanation, adding an appropriate comment, and deciding in the moment what is needed to keep the story both comprehensible and engaging. The teacher is not merely providing the input; the teacher is continually creating the conditions in which the input can be understood.

Start with short, easy stories and gradually move toward longer and more complex stories. Do this over years rather than expecting rapid mastery after a small number of stories. Imagine what students may be able to understand after hearing 100, 200, or 300 comprehensible stories and gradually reading more and more Korean.

In some ways, teaching from a textbook is easier for the teacher. The curriculum tells us what vocabulary and grammar to teach. We explain the rules, ask students to memorize words, give them exercises and tests, correct their errors, and evaluate how well they have learned and remembered what was taught. When students do poorly, it is easy to conclude that they did not study enough or did not remember enough.

Story-Listening places the responsibility differently. We do not ask whether the students studied hard enough to understand the story. We ask whether we made the story comprehensible enough for them to understand it. If they did not understand, our first question should be: What could I have done differently? Perhaps I chose a story that was too difficult. Perhaps my explanation was not clear enough. Perhaps I introduced too much unfamiliar language, or perhaps I failed to notice when the students were losing the thread of the story.

This makes Story-Listening demanding for the teacher. Successful Story-Listening requires careful story selection, preparation, observation, and the ability to adjust the telling to the listeners in front of us. The learners are responsible for attending to the story, but the teacher is responsible for creating the conditions that make understanding possible.

The Specific Questions

3. Could the stories be about my day or my students' day? Would they have the same impact?

I would not recommend this. For Story-Listening, particularly with beginning and elementary learners, I recommend fairy tales and folktales rather than personalized stories about the teacher or students. I also do not put students' names into the stories.

One important reason for using fairy tales and folktales for Story-Listening is their universal human interest. Across cultures and generations, people have been drawn to stories about love and hate, jealousy and revenge, truth and falsehood, dignity and humiliation, faith, remorse, forgiveness, reconciliation, and many other fundamental human experiences. These themes do not have to be artificially made "relevant" to students by putting the students themselves into the story. The human problems in the story are already relevant.

Traditional tales have another important advantage: they often have a clear sequence of events, recognizable human problems, and universal themes. These qualities help listeners follow the flow of the story even when some of the language is new.

4. A colleague suggested using stories with similar vocabulary so that students are not overwhelmed by new words. Is that a valid suggestion?

I would approach this differently. Do not select stories in order to recycle predetermined vocabulary. Select stories that the students are likely to enjoy and that you can make comprehensible.

Students will not necessarily be overwhelmed by unfamiliar words if they understand the flow of the story and want to know what happens next. Rather than asking learners to work consciously to understand particular words, give them stories they genuinely want to hear. When they are absorbed in the story, their attention is on the message and on what will happen next. If an unfamiliar word appears, a quick, simple explanation from the teacher can make it comprehensible, and the story can continue without frustration or loss of interest.

Of course, use words that the students already know whenever possible. If they are true beginners, begin with stories they may already know and use drawings and other comprehension-aiding support extensively.

It is important, however, not to misunderstand the role of drawings in Story-Listening. Some teachers see Story-Listening demonstrations and assume that Story-Listening simply means telling a story with pictures. They sometimes ask whether reading a picture book aloud would therefore be the same thing. It is not.

Story-Listening is not simply storytelling with drawings. The teacher uses both linguistic and nonlinguistic comprehension aids to make the spoken language comprehensible. Nonlinguistic aids include drawings, gestures, facial expressions, and other visual support. Linguistic aids include familiar words, synonyms, paraphrases, explanations, and written words on the board.

The distinction is important because the language itself must remain part of what the learners are attending to and understanding. A person can understand and enjoy a silent movie entirely through images and actions, but no language acquisition can result because there is no linguistic input. In Story-Listening, the drawings are there to help learners understand the Korean they are hearing; they are not there to replace the Korean.

With true beginners, you may initially need to rely heavily on drawings and written words on the board to establish meaning. But with each comprehensible story, the learners acquire more language, and that language becomes a resource for making later language comprehensible. For example, after little pig has become familiar, small pig can be made comprehensible through the familiar word little. If bad wolf is familiar, those known words can later help learners understand new combinations and contrasts such as good dog. Words that were new in one story gradually become familiar and can then help you explain new language in later stories. In this way, the students' comprehension resources grow naturally from story to story, and the teacher can gradually rely more on language and less on visual support.

This does not mean, however, that listeners must understand every word or every sentence you say. That is neither necessary nor the goal. What matters is that they can follow the flow of the story and come away with the feeling, "I understood the story." They may miss individual words or expressions along the way and still understand what is happening and want to know what happens next.

This is also one reason it is useful to ask students to write a summary after the Story-Listening session. Different students will naturally understand different amounts. Some may write a great deal, while others may write less. Their summaries show you what each student was able to understand without requiring everyone to have understood exactly the same words or details. Over time, the summaries can also show the development of their listening comprehension.

New words, therefore, are not something we need to avoid. The important question is not, "How many new words does this story contain?" but, "Can I make this story comprehensible while keeping the students interested in its message?"

I would also avoid relying heavily on English translation. Try first to make Korean comprehensible through drawings, gestures, familiar Korean words, synonyms, paraphrases, and other forms of Comprehension-Aiding Supplementation (CAS). A brief English explanation can be used when necessary, but it should not unnecessarily interrupt the flow of the story.

The aim is to keep the students' attention inside the Korean story as much as possible. When the story is compelling and comprehensible, they continue listening because they want to know what happens next. Their attention remains on meaning rather than on consciously trying to learn or remember the language.

5. Is Story-Listening more effective than traditional CI teaching because it provides richer vocabulary?

I would not explain the difference simply in terms of the number of vocabulary words.

P.O.U.I. is designed to provide input that is comprehensible, interesting or compelling, rich, and abundant, while removing activities that are not necessary for acquisition. In our research, we have been particularly interested in both effectiveness and efficiency: what students acquire and how much instructional time, teacher labor, and learner effort are required.

However, you are right that Story-Listening can expose students to a much richer range of vocabulary. In a conventional textbook, vocabulary is usually introduced according to a predetermined sequence: certain words are assigned to the first year, others to the second year, and so on. Story-Listening does not need to follow such a sequence. If a word is needed to tell an interesting story and the teacher can make it comprehensible, it can be used.

At the same time, high-frequency words occur naturally again and again across stories. The teacher also uses familiar, high-frequency language to make new words comprehensible. Thus, familiar language is continually encountered while new language is gradually added.

Stories themselves are naturally rich in vocabulary because every story takes us into a different world. Different stories have different characters, occupations, places, situations, relationships, actions, emotions, conflicts, and problems. A story about a farmer requires one set of words; a story about a king and his daughters requires another; a story about a merchant, a thief, a doctor, or a fisherman introduces still other language. When students hear many different stories, the range of language they encounter expands naturally without the teacher having to construct a vocabulary syllabus.

This is very different from deliberately selecting a set of vocabulary items and then designing activities to teach and practice them. In Story-Listening, the story determines the language; the vocabulary does not determine the story.

The approach does not require students to buy or study a conventional textbook. The teacher can provide the written story after Story-Listening and, when useful, a reference list of less familiar words and their English meanings. Such a list is for comprehension and reference, not a vocabulary list to memorize for a test.

In a P.O.U.I. program, there is no required vocabulary memorization, no vocabulary testing, no required target-language output, no homework for conscious language study, and no error correction intended to teach the language consciously.

So the important point is not simply "more vocabulary." Story-Listening provides more time spent understanding rich, meaningful language, and because students hear many different stories while familiar language continues to recur, they naturally encounter and acquire an increasingly broad range of vocabulary.

6. Is there a way to assess the impact of Story-Listening on my students?

Yes.

After a story, have the students write in English what they understood. You can examine their summaries to see how much of the message each student understood. Keep the summaries in individual folders.

The summaries collected throughout the course can be used for formative assessment, providing a record of each student's developing listening comprehension. If you do this regularly, you will accumulate a record of each student's development over time. Early in the program, students may be able to report only a relatively simple story. Later, as their listening competence develops, they may be able to understand and report much longer and more complex stories.

For summative assessment at the end of the term, you can tell a longer and more complex story that the students have never heard before and ask them to write in English what they understood. I think you may be surprised by how much they are able to report.

The fact that the story is new is important. The students have not memorized the story, studied its vocabulary beforehand, or practiced answers to questions about it. If they can understand a new story told in Korean, they are demonstrating a developing ability to process Korean for meaning and to use the competence they have acquired to understand new input. They are not simply recalling declarative knowledge that was taught in preparation for a test.

If you are teaching them to read and write the Korean alphabet at the same time, some students may eventually become able to write their summaries in Korean. This can give you additional information about the development of their Korean. However, if your purpose is specifically to assess listening comprehension, I would continue to allow summaries in English so that limitations in their Korean writing ability do not prevent them from showing how much of the story they actually understood.

To assess reading development, I have used cloze tests. I explain how to make, give, and score them in my article How Do You Actually Grade Story-Listening?, and the Cloze Testing Guide, with sample tests, is available on the Story-Listening website at no cost. [ADDED — links verified; needs Beniko's OK]

7. Some teenagers lose focus during Story-Listening. Should I keep working on my storytelling skills?

Yes, but I would look at two things: the story and its comprehensibility.

Ask yourself first whether the story is genuinely interesting to these students. Then ask whether they are able to follow it easily enough to remain involved in it.

Think about what happens when people watch a good movie. They can remain absorbed for a long time because they want to know what happens next and they understand what is happening. Story-Listening should move in that direction.

If students are repeatedly losing interest, I would not immediately conclude that they have poor attention or are unwilling to learn. I would first ask: Was this the right story? Was it too difficult? Did I explain too much? Did the story lose its flow? What could I change in my telling?

This is why learning to select and prepare stories is such an important part of becoming a Story-Listening teacher.

I have had students who appeared to lose interest, become sullen, or even seem rebellious during Story-Listening. When I spoke with them individually and asked why they had reacted that way, their answer was consistently the same: they did not understand what I was saying.

Sometimes the problem is not the story or the student, but a mismatch between the level of the Story-Listening session and the student's current listening competence. In a class where students have different levels of competence, some students may simply not yet be ready to follow the same stories as the rest of the group.

When this happened in my classes, I invited those students to separate Story-Listening sessions. I told them much easier, simpler, and shorter stories once a week so that they could gradually build their listening competence and eventually catch up with the others.

This experience taught me not to interpret apparent lack of attention too quickly as a problem of motivation or attitude. Sometimes what looks like "I am not interested" or "I do not want to listen" may actually mean "I cannot understand." Our first responsibility as teachers is therefore to ask whether the input is truly comprehensible to that particular learner.

8. In an ideal Story-Listening program, how would I run a high-school language class, especially if I need to give grades?

The long-term goal of a P.O.U.I. program is to help learners develop listening competence and gradually become independent, self-selecting readers in the target language.

A basic Story-Listening cycle might look like this:

1. Find an appropriate and interesting story.
2. Prepare a Prompter, a teacher-preparation list of the important language and information you will need in order to tell the story.
3. Rehearse the story until you have a clear mental picture of its events. Do not memorize a script.
4. Decide how you will make potentially difficult language comprehensible using Comprehension-Aiding Supplementation: drawings, gestures, familiar words, synonyms, paraphrases, and other support.
5. Tell the story naturally in Korean while observing your students and adjusting your telling according to their comprehension.
6. Ask them to write in English what they understood.
7. Collect the summaries and keep them in individual folders.
8. Give them the written version of the story and help them read it.
9. As their reading competence develops, gradually provide more Korean reading material and allow them increasing freedom to select what they want to read.

Over time, the stories and reading become longer and more complex.

For assessment, I would be very cautious about turning Story-Listening into a testing program. One possibility is to use the students' accumulated summaries as formative evidence of developing listening comprehension. At the end of a term, you might also tell an unfamiliar story appropriate to their developing level and ask them to write in English what they understood.

The important point is that they have not memorized the story or prepared particular vocabulary for the assessment. If they can understand a new story in Korean, this gives you evidence that their ability to process Korean for meaning has developed.

I also strongly recommend an orientation at the beginning of the course. Explain to the students what you are doing, why the class may be different from language classes they have experienced before, how they will be evaluated, and the theory and research behind the approach. Some students may be skeptical at first because they are accustomed to believing that language learning means memorizing vocabulary, studying grammar, practicing speaking, and taking tests. Their own experience over time may help them understand why you are teaching differently.

Dr. Krashen and I have written a number of papers explaining the theoretical and research background of these ideas, and I cannot explain everything adequately in one article.

We have also prepared a short handbook explaining what a Story-Listening and Guided Self-Selected Reading (GSSR) program is like. It was written especially to help teachers explain the approach to parents, colleagues, administrators, and others who may wonder why students are listening to stories and reading rather than studying vocabulary and grammar, practicing speaking and writing, or preparing for conventional language tests. The handbook is available in English on the Story-Listening website, and versions in several other languages are on the way.

You may find it useful not only for your own understanding but also when you need to explain to others why your classroom may look different from a traditional foreign-language classroom.

I hope this helps you see the larger picture. You do not need to change everything at once. If your school has requirements that you must follow, naturally you will need to work within them. But I hope you can begin experiencing for yourself what happens when students receive a large amount of interesting, comprehensible Korean without being required to study, memorize, or produce the language.

— Beniko