After analyzing the above two excerpts, the researcher found that despite the teacher’s efforts in providing scaffolding moves, students’ decisions whether or not to participate decided the type of classroom interaction. As indicated by Bruner (1983), in storytelling the teller often structures the process to provide a scaffold to ensure that the listeners’ ineptitudes can be rescued or rectified by appropriate intervention. With the teacher’s scaffolds, student participation became easier, and the more students that participated, the more scaffolding moves the teacher could provide to promote their language learning. As a result, the teacher did not need to restructure or reformulate her questions into yes-no ones to elicit student responses as she did with the control group, and thus “the interaction flows in a natural way” (Van Lier, 1996, p. 195).
One thing needs to be mentioned is the limitation of the recording technique. One might notice that there were many overlapping turns in the storytelling group, since many students responded at the same time on many occasions. The actual number of turns might in fact be higher if all the overlapping turns could be observed and recorded.
Perspectives from the Teacher
In addition to the above test results and the comparisons of the excerpts from the classes, support for the hypotheses could also be found from the reactions of the teacher. In the open-ended teacher interview, the English teacher mentioned that the nature of storytelling affected the classroom interaction and considerably changed the classroom atmosphere and students’ motivation to participate. In order to understand whether the instructor was in any way biased toward one way of teaching, which might influence the results of the study, the interview questions asked her to compare her teaching in the different classrooms. In general, she mentioned that although she liked storytelling and had learned the techniques needed to carry it out, she was more confident in teaching story reading in the control group, and enjoyed this teaching very much. When asked to compare the two groups, she was able to clearly describe the differences.
Specifically, the teacher mentioned that the students in the storytelling group often repeated or chanted with the teacher during the storytelling process or mouthed words or sentences during their recall writings. The latter of these occurrences, an example of “private speech” from Vygotsky’s perspective, indicates that the learners were
engaged in the process of learning (Hall, 2001). On the other hand, the students in the control group were not as ready to vocalize during class, and there was little evidence of engagement in private speech during their recall writings. The teacher believed that students in the storytelling group were more active, because the nature of storytelling involved interactions between the teller and the listeners.
Likewise, the teacher indicated that in writing recalls the students in the storytelling group usually wrote up to the last minute, but many students in the control group finished long before the allotted time was over. Without storytelling instruction, she further commented, the students in the control group could not achieve the same degree of interaction in spite of many attempts on the part of the teacher to encourage them. Without the listener-hearer involvement in the storytelling process, it is not easy to trigger voluntary student interaction. The teacher also added that students in Taiwan are very used to lectures and worksheets. Thus, the teacher believed that such difference might have also contributed to the longer recalls of the storytelling group.
CONCLUSIONS
This study examined whether storytelling instruction can improve both the quantity and the quality of interaction in a teacher-centered English language classroom and facilitate learning. The findings indicate that storytelling instruction significantly increased the number, if not the length, of student turns. A closer examination of the type of interaction that occurred in the storytelling classroom shows that the teacher tended to use more open-ended questioning
techniques, maintained direction more often, and used less feedback that simply consisted of making a qualitative judgment on the content of student responses. Overall, the discourse in the storytelling class created more opportunities for scaffolding, and thus supported student interaction in the Zone of Proximal Development. With regard to language development, there were statistically demonstrable differences favoring the storytelling group in terms of comprehending reading material and employing story structures in writing.
The teacher thought that the two-way communication of storytelling naturally nurtured meaningful interactions between the teller and the listeners, and also motivated learners to participate orally in class. In this way, the art of storytelling smoothly transformed a written text into oral presentation and provided excellent examples to help language learners link these two forms of language. In addition, linking the oral and written forms of language probably helped students whose preparation had been largely based on the written word to participate more fully in oral interaction, and to make connections between the written and spoken language.
The positive influence of storytelling on this particular large, teacher-centered English language class in terms of increasing the amount of interaction, improving its quality, and encouraging increased language development, suggests that storytelling could be a fruitful technique to use in similar contexts. Perhaps the notion that not having enough access to oral language to be able to learn to communicate in that mode can be dispelled, and learners can greatly benefit by improving in English and other foreign languages.
In conclusion, the researcher would like to suggest that storytelling could be a persuasive vehicle for helping teachers
accustomed to a teacher-centered classroom to elicit more frequent and effective student oral participation. Research indicates that educational innovations are most likely to be accepted when they align with current teacher beliefs or when those beliefs can be slightly modified to accept them (Ambrose 2004; Errington 2004), although such modifications are slow, incremental, and tied to broader personal, social and historical contexts (Stephens, Gaffney, Weinzierl, Shelton,
& Clark, 1993). As discussed above, the changes made in the implementation of the storytelling approach were not a dramatic departure from standard practice, but the resulting differences in classroom interaction were both qualitatively and quantitatively significant, and students showed marked improvements in other skills compared to the control group. Hence, the researcher concludes that storytelling is an approach that should be explored and promoted in the Taiwanese and similar contexts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by grants from National Science Council (NSC 92-2411-H-024-002) in Taiwan. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments.
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