Concept and Task 13

Storytelling

Learning through storytelling is fun, interesting, interactive and enlightening too! Storytelling can be included in language learning to meet the following objectives:

• To learn the appropriate use of grammatical elements
• To practice appropriate stylistics and other linguistic elements
• To improve language proficiency - mainly writing - in social, professional as well as creative ways

Here is an exercise for you to hone up your skills, knowledge and proficiency on the above.

Main characters

Aliyah, David, Harris and Samaira

(They are Engineering/Management students and best of friends)

Instruction: This is a group activity. The starting lines of the story are provided, which learners groups have to develop using their own imagination, vocabulary skills, and of course the grammatical elements mentioned below so that each week the story develops with its own twists and turns to a fine and interesting ending.

1. Each group must have at least one possibility of unique ending.
2. Groups can add new characters whenever required.
3. Group members can meet regularly/weekly to discuss their story-line.

Grammatical elements to include:

• Verbs with simple past and past perfect tenses
• Noun clauses, transitional words
• Determiners, interrogative pronouns
• Imperative sentences, comparison
• Relative pronouns, negative sentences
• Collective nouns, questions
• Time clauses, adjectives
• Passive sentences, prepositional phrases
• Adverbs, abstract nouns
• Countable nouns, possessive pronouns
• Uncountable nouns, personal pronouns
• Infinitive phrases, gerund phrases
• Singular and plural references

Start of the story-line

It was a dark night with no signs of the moon on the sky. Aliyah was walking slowly and timidly while trying not to get scared of the haunting darkness. While fearing the ensuing thunderstorm, she kept praying hard to be able to reach her home safe and sound. At the same time, Aliyah kept wondering why David, Harris and Samaira did not turn up for tonight’s International Students' function. She cannot believe the fact that her best buddies did not even feel the need to inform her about skipping the function. She decided to confront them about it the first thing in the next morning class.

“Did they fall ill?” Aliyah thought for a moment. But she refused to believe in the idea thinking that all of her friends cannot fall sick at the same time.

“Are they in some kind of danger?”

The thought sent chills down her spine as she kept walking.

Wish you all the best with your interesting, unique and out-of-the-box ideas.

Happy Learning!