Storytelling in an English language class:

• shares common language patterns and phrases
• presents vocabulary in a motivating manner
• develops listening comprehension skill
• improves expressive language ability
• introduces cultures from English speaking lands
• helps students gain confidence, as they tell to others.

Here are a few American storytelling materials to start with — some are quite simple, others more sophisticated.

Tongue twisters

• Six slick, slim saplings.


• A cup of coffee in a copper coffee pot.


• Six gray geese in a green field grazing.

Riddles

What has teeth but cannot eat?               

What is light as a feather,
yet you cannot hold it for five minutes?          

As long as I eat, I live,
but when I drink, I die.

What is the end of everything?

What is the difference between “here” and “there”?

Why is 6 afraid of 7?

Longer riddles are rich in description and fun for older students to write:

I may have the face of someone important in my country. When I am very young, I make my first and only journey. The day I start, I am bright and colorful. I travel from one city to another, or from one country to another. When my trip is over, I look tired and sometimes dirty. Usually, people then throw me right away. What am I?               

[Answers: comb, your breath, fire, g, t, because 7 8 9 (7 ate 9),  postage stamp]

Rhymes

Little Tee Wee

He went to sea
In an open boat.
And while afloat,
The little boat bended,
And my story’s ended.

A Short Story

I’ll tell you a story
About old Mother Morey,
And now my story’s begun.
I’ll tell you another
About her brother,
And now my story is done.

Words to consider

Older students may enjoy reading and discussing the thoughts behind these powerful words by a Native American woman years ago.

“When we Indians dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don’t chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the white people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything. The tree says,‘Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it up....How can the spirit of the earth like the white man? Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore.”       Wintu woman of California in Touch the Earth ed. T.C. McLuhan. N.Y.: Promontory Press, 1971, p. 15