Hongmin Skyly Yu, Cleveland State University
I attended the OFLA Teaching Towards Language Acquisition workshop. The topics included comprehensible input strategies like storytelling. But why use stories? It seems that the authentic scene of conversation is more helpful to second language learning. Communication is the first goal of second language learning. Why do we need a story? Learning language connects literature to life and can build contextualized comprehension input. The teacher can guide students to create interesting stories together that align with the appropriate age and language level. Meaningful dramatic stories can help them ground the foundational structure, accumulate various synonyms, homonyms, and word chunks in sentences. This is true especially for novice and intermediate level because the stories are fun and the vocabulary is easy to store in long-term memory. If the teacher creates a funny story, the story includes high-frequency words of the target language and results in students reading with joy, practicing, memorizing and performing gladly. For instance, the teacher can create a story of the target language as shown below: Continue reading
The Cardinal 