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2.2.3. Storytelling as an Instructional Method

Because of children’s characteristics, many educators have tried to adopt story-telling in the teaching of younger children, while some others also adopt it in classes for older learners and adults.

Ringo Ma is one of them. Ma (1994) believed that story-telling is an efficient teaching strategy for nonnative instructors in the U.S. higher education. Foreign teachers sometimes find it hard to build trust among native students. Emphasizing his or her teaching experience or scholar accomplishment in the subject does not work so well. From the rhetoric perspective, “the logos, ethos, and pathos derived from story- telling can make a nonnative instructor both meaningful and attractive to students” (Ma, 1994: 7). From an instructional perspective, Ma claimed that administrators and students at U.S. institutions of higher education lack pluralistic thinking. By telling students the teacher’s multicultural experiences, pluralistic thinking is promoted, a multivocal system is built and the teacher’s perceived status is changed form being a liability to an asset.

Andrews et al. (2009) identify four instructional methods that are related to storytelling: case-based, narrative-based, scenario-based and problem-based instruction. Each method presents learners with “a temporally ordered sequence of information and employs an attention-focusing mechanism” (Andrews et al., 2009:7). The four instructional methods are generally used in military training.

2. Analysis and Discussion

The primary materials to be analyzed and discussed are video classes on the Internet. Two classes are teaching English vocabulary, two for speaking English and two for
English grammar. In these settings, the teacher is James, who tells daily experience or his own experience in the past, or creates stories in his classes, and the audience consists of students who are watching the video-taped classes on the Internet instead of attending classes at present. The forms of stories narrated at each class will be recorded and discussed in this section. Which type of story is most frequently adopted by the teacher? At which kind of class would the teacher prefer to use narration to help students to understand and memorize the contents of classes? These questions are also to be answered.

1.