What Happens When Beginners Listen to Stories?

By Beniko Mason

When I reported the vocabulary acquisition rates (remembering rates) of college students using Story-Listening were around .18 to .25 words per minute (wpm) on the delayed post test 5 weeks later, critics said that the high rates were because the subjects were experienced English learners. So, I tested this using 7th graders at a public junior high school where students began to take English as a foreign language officially for the first time. Their rates were .19 and .21 wpm.

The Study

One group heard a familiar story (the three little pigs). Their teacher who had been telling them stories told the story. It took him 22 minutes to finish telling the story. The subjects took a pretest, immediate post test and the delayed post test after 4 weeks. The remembering rate after 4 weeks was .21 wpm.

Then we used an unfamiliar story (Lazy Jack) and a stranger (the first author) who had never met the subjects before told the story and took 26 minutes to finish telling the story. The delayed post test was administered after 2 weeks. The rate was .19 wpm.

The story was told entirely in English with Comprehension-Aiding Supplementation (CAS): drawings, gestures, synonyms, simpler restatements when difficult words appeared.

Why Their Rates Were Not Lower

Because when input is comprehensible, acquisition can occur—regardless of prior knowledge.

Their rates were not lower because understanding—not prior knowledge—is what determines acquisition.

These results suggest that neither age nor prior knowledge determines vocabulary acquisition. When input is made comprehensible, learners can acquire and retain new language regardless of their starting point.

This may seem to contradict common sense. We often assume that more experience leads to better results. It is also commonly said that children acquire a foreign language faster, while adults are slower. However, these findings suggest that when input is truly comprehensible, such differences may not be the deciding factor.

What This Means for Preparation

Effective Story-Listening preparation for learners of any age or proficiency level is simple in principle. The teacher selects an interesting story and tells it in a way that listeners can understand, using Comprehension-Aiding Supplementation (CAS).

The focus is not on the learners' level, but on making the story comprehensible.

Reference: Mason, B. & Ae, N. (2021). Story-Listening with Japanese EFL Junior High School Students: Is Pre-teaching of Vocabulary Necessary? Selected Papers, PAC & TEFL, 247–255.