ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Jennifer Bassett

Kumiko Torikai

Curtis Kelly

Chuck Sandy

Marc Helgesen

Panelists: Jennifer | Kumiko | Curtis | Chuck | Marc
Date: November 2005

Topic: "Sharing Our Stories"

This Think Tank is a follow up to that of September 2005 and the subsequent Think Tank Live event at the JALT2005 National Conference.

O Best Beloved, a Parable for ELT Storytellers
Jennifer Bassett

ONCE UPON A TIME, a long, long time ago, on a small damp island off the north-west coast of Europe, there was a young woman who decided to become an English language teacher. We will call her Cinder- teller. That was not her real name, O Best Beloved, but that is what we will call her.

So Cinder-teller did a training course, and she went to live on an island in Greece, where the sun shone all day long, and the sea sparkled with silver light, and the dolphins played in the clear water. But Cinder-teller soon found that she did not see much of the sunshine or the sparkling sea, because teaching was much harder work than she had realised. She taught her lessons during the day, and during the night she studied hard at her books. And she learnt many things, O Best Beloved.

“In a classroom, Cinder-teller knew when her students were bored, because they fell asleep or sent text messages to their friends.”

She learnt that language is like a river ­ swift and sinuous and ever-moving. She learnt that students on the river of language can go upstream, which is hard work pushing against the current, and they can also go downstream, and travel easily with the current. And it is good to travel both ways, because the view of the countryside on the riverbanks is equally beautiful, whether you go upstream or downstream.

Cinder-teller carried on teaching, and then teacher training, and on one of those training courses there was a tall, dark, handsome man called Mr Rochester ­ Reader, I married him . . .

And so the years went by. Then Cinder-teller began to write teaching materials for students. She wrote course books and grammar books, and finally she came back to her first love ­ stories.

But when she began storytelling for learners, she found that writing stories was much harder work than she had realised. For writing, O Best Beloved, is, as we know, just as interactive as speaking although ­ in the words of the Wise Wizard Widdowson ­ there is no immediate reciprocal negotiation of meaning, no joint management of the interaction as there is in a conversation. In a classroom, Cinder-teller knew when her students were bored, because they fell asleep or sent text messages to their friends. When they didn't understand something, their faces went blank or they sent text messages to their friends. When they were amused, they laughed ­ or sent text messages to their friends.

But Cinder-teller could not see the students' faces when she wrote stories, and she wanted very much to enact a discourse by proxy, so to speak, because meaning is always negotiable. It is not inscribed in the language itself, and texts do not signal their own significance.

So Cinder-teller invented some imaginary readers to sit with her as she wrote. And they were three students, one from Patagonia, one from Kazakhstan, and one from Okinawa. There were three of them, O Best Beloved, because three is a magic number and there are always three of everything in the best stories.

And they were a great help to Cinder-teller, always looking over her shoulder, and reminding her about cultural norms and telling her to avoid unilateral idiomaticity.

The student from Patagonia would say things like . . .

"The character in this story in London is talking about August weather, but here in August we have freezing cold winds and snow in the mountains ­ is that what you mean by August weather?"

The student from Kazakhstan would say . . .

"This story set in Europe keeps mentioning the War. Which war? Here in central Asia," she said, "we have a war to the west of us, and a war to the south of us. There are wars all around us. Which war do you mean?"

And then the student from Okinawa said . . .

But he didn't say anything that day, because he had better things to do ­ he was down on the beach.

So Cinder-teller knew she had to try harder. She listened, and learned, and the more she learned, the more she knew how little she had learned, and how writing stories is the same as travelling on the river of language. You must stay afloat, you must watch the current, you must not turn your boat around in mid- stream ­ or you will fall overboard and be drowned.

For in the words of the Wise Wizard Wilga Rivers, "All writers are blinded by the knowledge of their own intentions."

So Cinder-teller knew that she must never stop learning. And for every story that she wrote, she listened all the time to the shadowy voices of the readers in her mind.

And for all we know, O Best Beloved, she is still there now, writing stories in a little room, and listening to the opinions and arguments and advice from the students from Patagonia, Kazakhstan, and Okinawa.

Panelists: Jennifer | Kumiko | Curtis | Chuck | Marc

Discuss this topic on our Message Board

Jennifer Bassett, series editor of the Oxford Bookworms

<<Back Number | Top | Recent Issue>>