A talk for The Japanese Association for Studies in English Communication (JASEC), The Twenty-ninth Annual Convention (online Zoom convention), October 17, 2020.
In this talk, I claim that humans are naturally wired for story. We find story more comprehensible, memorable, and compelling than non-story. And though story may be the language teacher’s oldest tool, we can clarify and simplify how we define story. And with the clear and simple sense of story, we can work to weave it more deeply into every strand of language education — making all our language teaching — more story-centric.
Language teachers may easily weave story into input, output, and fluency activities, but grammar and form-focused activities present a more difficult challenge because we usually teach grammar simply by focusing on the nuts and bolts of language. Thus, in this talk I introduce a few ways that we can infuse story into the teaching of linguistics forms.