Narratives are a powerful teaching tool. Put them in coursebooks, says Terry Phillips

Why should we use narratives with language learners? The use of continuing stories in ELT coursebooks has fallen out of fashion, but this seems a great shame. Narratives can be a very powerful language learning tool, in so many ways.

Reading and listening

Let’s deal with the obvious first. Narratives are perfect for practicing prediction, the key receptive skill. In L1, a reader or listener is always ahead of the text. Receivers predict, in their heads, what is coming next, read or listen to the next section and correct their hypothesis accordingly.

We must develop this skill in our students, and narratives enable the teacher to constantly check that students are, indeed, ahead of the text.

Independent learning

A second powerful benefit of narratives is that, by definition, they have a story arc, which means that we can provide hooks (e.g. What happens next?) to keep the learner interested. We know that reading in a foreign language can make a valuable contribution to independent learning, so the motivational power of narrative is important.

A good narrative draws the reader or listener into the story, and, if well-written, into the lives of the characters. Students want to know how the action evolves, and what the protagonist and antagonist do next.

It is rare in the emotional desert of the ELT classroom that students are genuinely involved in presentation or practice activities, but this involvement is a natural by-product of using narratives. 

Speaking and writing

So narratives get students motivated and actively reading or listening. But they can also be used as a springboard for developing speaking and writing.

The most obvious link to speaking practice is role play, in which students act out scenes from the narrative, or predict scenes which might happen next.

For writing, the easiest task is summarizing a chapter, but we can also develop creative writing by asking students to write the summary from the point of view of one of the characters involved in the events.

Critical thinking

Narratives work very well with two elements of so-called 21st-century skill. First, inferencing or ‘reading between the lines’.

A good set of True/False statements can tease out whether students can go beyond what they actually read or hear to what can be inferred. Ideally, the statements should not repeat anything in the narrative, but get the students to go deeper.

For example, if the narrative contains a brave action by one of the characters, a good T/F statement is ‘X is brave’, but only if that statement is not spelled out in the narrative.

Secondly, we can ask students to use logical reasoning to explain why something happened or what will happen if Character A does X. The accuracy of the answer shows us how much of the narrative has been understood.

Presenting and practising grammar

A narrative offers perfect opportunities for showing the complex interaction of past tenses, such as when past continuous or past perfect are required in English.

But when we bring in summarising we can also ask students to use present tenses. Synopses of stories and films are normally written in the present, so this is not an artificial class activity.

Once we see narrative as more than just ‘reading for pleasure’, many activities come into view in a more effective way than if we base context on sentence level examples. To name but a few … pronoun and possessive adjective references, use of articles, adverbial phrases of time, place and method, etc.

Presenting and practising syntax

The possible exercises listed under reading and listening (above) which test prediction skills, for example, What is the next word/phrase/sentence? can only be completed with full accuracy if students have followed the narrative. And they have also decoded the syntax up to the point where you stop the sentence or paragraph, for example, A goes to … (B’s house) because she wants to (borrow some money).

To sum up, most ELT coursebooks no longer feature running narratives, but they are such a powerful teaching and learning tool, perhaps it is time for some brave writer – and publisher – to take the plunge and bring them back.