Page 34 - Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

18 Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

Use of Storytelling in Theoretical Classes

Claudia Patricia Contreras

Aixchel Cordero Hidalgo

Patricia Murguía Jáquez

Autonomous University of Chihuahua

Keywords: action research, narrative, storytelling, teaching strategy.

This research project explores storytelling as a teaching strategy in the linguistics and discourse anal-
ysis classes with university students. Since these courses are highly theoretical, they require much
reading and analyzing, sometimes it is hard to teach an enjoyable class when presenting theories.
This project goal is to stimulate students through an Action Research approach. Low grades became
a consistent pattern, therefore, steps were taken towards the solution: having students learn through
doing, applying what they had learned in class. Stories were used in two streams: teaching and eval-
uation. The preliminary results of the experiment show how storytelling helped students to improve
their grades by offering insights into different aspects of those theories in a way they found easier to
understand.

The main objectives of the project can be summarized as:

1. To encourage an interest in theoretical subjects through story-
telling.

2. To make theories memorable to the students
3. To build complex thinking.

4. To give the students the freedom to use their creativity in devel-
oping a story based on a theory as a variation of the typical test.

5. To help students improve their grades.

Theoretical Framework

Storytelling has been studied widely over the last 30 years (Filipi, 2017). Bruner (1991, as cited in
Filipi 2017), establishes that storytelling requires the ability to locate the time, causes and sequence
of events. Girgulio (2006, as cited in Steslown and Gardner (2011) ‘‘stories are fundamental to the
way we learn and to the way we communicate. They are the most efficient way of storing, retrieving,
and conveying information’’ (p21). Storytelling has been used at all educational levels (Morgan and
Dennehy, 1997, in Steslown and Gardner 2011), from elementary schools to graduate schools but
approximately twenty years ago, law school professors began writing about the application of nar-
ratives to introduce legal concepts because it was found that storytelling can add interest to them.