When educators fail to infuse teaching and learning with the logic of story, they deprive themselves and their students of the most powerful form of communication and teaching available to the human mind — for the promotion of all learning. For example, when Brown et al. (2014) wrote their renowned book about the science of successful learning, they hired a storyteller as their third author. Though the effectiveness of story-logic connects to all forms of learning, this paper focuses specifically on language education. It provides a succinct definition of the magnetic elements of story and a clear theory for story-logical language education. It also sets out a simple framework, Nation’s four-strands (Nation, 2007), which language teachers can use as a guide to add story-logic in every aspect of language teaching. And it summarizes an experiment where participants liked the characters more, enjoyed the text more, and recalled and comprehended information better when it was embedded in and infused with story-logic.

This is an abstract for a paper that will be published by Senshu University Institute for the Humanities. The attached PDF is the questionnaire used for the experiment in the study.

Here is a PDF of the article Language Teaching with Story-Logic.