Creating a Story Without a Script
From storyasking
You can create a story without a story script by starting with a simple impersonal sentence, any sentence, personalizing it via PQA, and then developing this personalized sentence into a story.
First, start with a single sentence.
Next, write it on the board and translate it.
Example:
Classe, un homme veut une orange/Class, a man wants an orange
Sign and gesture any new words. You only spend a few minutes on this.
Next, circle subject/verb/object of your sentence, pausing and pointing at each new word, listening for cute answers. Your structure will gradually change via the circling into something like:
Classe, Richard (your student) veut une moustache!/Class, Richard wants a moustache!
This does not and cannot happen quickly, and there is no rush to move from the impersonal first sentence into the personalized second sentence. It just kind of happens when you circle and listen to their cute answers.
The key in moving from the impersonal first sentence to the personalized second sentence is to keep your inner eye on the students and see which one would best fit into the new one, and then wait for it to naturally happen. If you keep your inner eye on the class, a student will appear as the “right” one for the new sentence.
As your original structure and your scripted story now fade in importance, you begin focusing more and more on the student who seemed to be the right one for the new sentence.
So via slow circling, listening for cute answers, the questioning (PQA) naturally becomes about a person in the room. PQA is not hard. You just take a general sentence and you use circling to replace the information (a man wants an orange) with new personalized information (your student Richard wants a moustache).
When you have this, you have a personalized sentence and if you want you can stand Richard up immediately and go into a story based on the story script and its three locations but personalized. So you can go into a story at anytime.
Some teachers like to do this, others (me) like to stay in PQA, learning things about the kids. This is not to say that I never go into stories, but I wait until there is some really CHARGED information before I start. In other words, I am picky. I won't start a story until an idea kind of "comes into focus" in the back of my mind during the period of PQA,
As opposed to a scripted story, this way of creating a story just emerges naturally from the PQA and is connected to it. One reason for teachers not "getting" storytelling is that they think that the story must be about the scripted story, but if it is, how can it be about the kids in your classroom?
Just remember that if you stick a kid into a scripted story and leave out all the personalized information you gathered during PQA, and you try to mold the kid into the story instead of molding the story around the kid, it won't work.
It would be like asking kids to go to a section of the room and pretend they are giraffes. Of the two, which are more interesting – your students or giraffes? You have to mold the story around the kid. Thus, Susie says, personalization is at the heart of TPRS.
The simple morphing of your original line
A man wants an orange
into
Richard wants a brown moustache
is an idea of monumental importance in TPRS. You take a basic structure and you expand on it - personalizing it at a slow and natural pace via slow circling, listening for cute answers, pausing and pointing to make sure you give the class time to process each new sound into meaning.
Once you have this new personalized sentence, you can at anytime go into a story. In location one Richard wants a moustache, he goes to a second location, doesn't get one, goes to third location, gets one.
Whether you use a scripted story or just one sentence as described above, remember that the fastest way to kill interest is to force the kid into the story, as per
Class, there is a man! (kid stand up and you tell him he is a man, even though he is only 14).
Then:
Class, the man wants an orange! (kid pretends to eat an orange).
How can you circle that? Where can this go? If your scripted story is
There is a man in Alexandria, Virginia. He wants an orange. He goes to Florida, and asks a chicken for an orange. The chicken give the boy an egg. The boy is sad. The boy goes to Canada. He asks a monkey for an orange. The monkey climbs a tree, descends, and gives the boy an orange. The boy is happy.
This is an extremely boring story. People who create TPRS materials like this have no intention that you tell that particular story. They are merely providing an idea for a story, with the intention that you use slow circling, listen for cute answers, pause and point to any new words to personalize it to create a new story. It is just there as a model. That is why PQA is the most important thing you can do in storytelling. Without personalization your story is not about the people in the room and thus by definition is boring.
And if you have any other plans, or activities, or some kid of sequence for you class, you are running the risk of letting your plans for the class (the curriculum) drive the story instead of creating a situation where the personal interests of the students drive the curriculum, via their cute answers to your slow circled personalized questions.
When your class is being driven by a curriculum, you are in your mind, but when the class is driving the curriculum, always making class more funny and more personal, you are in your heart. All good teaching comes from the heart.
The word “hear” is in the word heart. But the kids only hear things that are about them. That is a fact about most teenagers. You connect with kids by finding out about what they are interested in so you always use your questionnaire. It is possible to teach for an entire year off one classroom set of questionnaires. You teach more, much more, when you do this, than by using the most wonderful curriculum in the world. That is because the most wonderful curriculum in the world is your students.\
Yes, it is possible, preferable, and best, in my view, to teach without materials. The current thinking is that TPRS and materials, books, etc. can just be blended together, but it is not true.
It is true that certain TPRS skills, especially circling, can inject life into a book-driven curriculum, but any curriculum driven by measurable outcomes works in the total opposite direction of TPRS, because books reduce knowledge of the language into little pieces, and TPRS expands knowledge of the language into a cohesive whole.
If you choose to create a story from a single sentence, it is best to start with one of your student’s questionnaire responses.
If Richard has stated, for example, that he is afraid of the dark, and you circle
Class, Richard is afraid of the dark!
You then have many choices:
- you can bring the other students into a discussion of this fear, asking others if they are also afraid of the dark.
- you can ask Richard other things about his questionnaire.
- you can stand Richard up and instantly bring in a problem, instantly creating a story by asking the student to stand up and then making up a problem that needs to be solved (e.g. it is midnight and Richard is alone in the mountains.)
- you can move to another student’s questionnaire.
If you choose (3), starting a story, you have successfully created a story without a story script.
