Irene Wilkie, University of the West of England

There are as many ways to use a traditional story as there are stories – possibly more. This is just one way which I have found goes down well.

Why use a traditional story? Well, one big advantage is that the children already know what happens (if you’re not sure they do, tell them the story in English the week before!). This allows you to be more adventurous with the level of language used. I find older children are very happy to accept what they might otherwise consider a ‘babyish story’ when it is in another language. It is also useful to talk about why some stories are common to different cultures.

I like to use the ‘before / during/ after’ approach, so I prepare for the story by teaching a few items of vocabulary so that the children can listen for these words and respond when they hear them in the story. For example, when I am preparing to tell them the Three Little Pigs, I teach pigs, wolf, house, straw, wood, bricks. I then give them each a card to hold with a picture of the word they have to listen for and respond to. When they hear their word in the story they have to respond in some way, either with an action, a sound or waving the card and shouting out the word (‘Crackerjack’ style for those of you old enough to remember the programme!) This ensures that they are all listening carefully and gives them an opportunity to jump up, shout, whatever you feel comfortable with - and they love it!

Rather than tell the story myself, I scan the pictures into a PowerPoint presentation and add an audio track. This can be done very easily if you have access to a software application called ‘Point Caste’, if not, you can use Windows Movie Maker to put pictures on the storyboard and add an audio track. The advantage of this is that the teacher is free to act out the story, orchestrate the responses, use puppets to complement the PowerPoint presentation etc. – generally act the clown! It also means that if the teacher is insecure about the pronunciation, a native speaker can be persuaded to record the text.

You can choose to either include the written text on the slides or not, depending on what you want to achieve. When telling the story in Spanish the phoneme / grapheme correspondence makes it easy to include the written word from the beginning.

There are many ways in which you could follow it up. Here are just some of the ideas I have used:

• show the story again with gaps in the text where you have removed the key words taught at the beginning
• sequence sentences from the story
• match the sentence to the picture
• find the Spanish for…  How did you work that out?
• act out the story along with the audio track
• let the children make their own storyboard / PowerPoint

Or of course… just tell it for fun and don’t make a didactic exercise out of it at all!