A Critical Investigation into How Year 8 Students’ Narrative Writing Skills are Developed Through the Medium of Oral Storytelling

Abstract

This research project seeks to examine, using approaches drawn from a case study, how oral storytelling within the classroom can influence various aspects of narrative writing. Therefore, certain teaching strategies and oral activities were implemented in a sequence of lessons which aimed to develop the style and content base of students’ narrative writing.

Teacher Trainees Telling Tales

“…Locally, interest is captured by the Cambridge School Classics project which puts on an annual Ovid Mythology competition and the website War with Troy is used by several of the schools where trainees are placed. Its use as a stimulus for learning has been well-documented by its author and past PGCE subject lecturer Bob Lister (2005Lister ( , 2007 and by Walker (2018), a former teacher trainee from the faculty. Some of the Latin textbooks such as Minimus (Bell, 1999) and Suburani (Hands-Up Education, 2020) contain myth episodes and are familiar to the teacher trainees.…”

“…During the explanation, I tipped the props from their box onto the desk in front of the students and they were instantly interested, trying to guess what on earth the story might be about. The students then asked if we could turn off the lights ‘for atmosphere’, as Walker's students did during her experience with the War with Troy recordings (Walker, 2018, p. 38). I had not planned to do this but it transpired to be a nice touch.…”

“…Moreover, if they are encouraged to participate, they are also more likely to learn, to broaden their views and to enrich their vocabulary, with remarkable benefits for their writing skills as well. This does not mean that we should overlook the importance of oral proficiency itself, as Walker observes (2018), but that oral practice may have positive effects on another form of expression that many students tend to find intimidating.…”

“…Even though, when asked, the two students of highest ability had said that oral storytelling was not their favourite way of being exposed to information because they couldn't go at their own pace, I believe that the oral exercise that stemmed from it benefitted them immensely. Mercer et al (2014) and Walker (2018) stress how important oracy is to employment and to generally succeeding in high profile positions (such as in ‘politics and top professions’) and the confidence in their own oracy is something that my character-sorting task hopefully allowed them to develop. I feel that their eloquent insight into their assigned character's motivations and their articulation of these beliefs to their peers proved both that oral storytelling worked in teaching them a large amount of course content and also that they could use this mode of delivery to ‘train up’ (for want of a better description) for later life.…”

“…However, I think an area in which my storytelling was not particularly successful was in prompting the students to use more complex literary and oral devices such as repetition or epithets. I intended to mirror the study carried out by Hannah Walker (2018) who encouraged students to use more oral devices through a sequence of lessons which centred around storytelling. However, I did not use these features extensively enough in my own storytelling to make these obvious, nor emphasise these in the discussion which followed, and if I repeated this lesson with this objective in mind, I would ensure that these features were more prominent.…”