Teaching English
Teaching English
To acquire any language other than L1 the model through which we learn our mother tongue is worth following. We listen many stories in our mother tongue and that is how to some extent we enrich our competence in L1. The same can be applied to acquire L2. Through stories we can help students to acquire L2 with interest; but there also we can add more elements like contextualization integration of various skills by making the story telling two way process. Students can also be the part of telling through storytelling and the story boxes are the only best way to that. Keeping in mind the same thing, Rita Collins comes out with an idea of the story boxes.
The title of the article itself makes everything clear to the reader: use of boxes for story telling; that contains the objects related to the story. It is not foreign to us to us to use realia in the class, but we often forget to use them in proper real life context and expect the students to learn the vocabulary. By presenting all the vocabulary in one single theme we are indirectly making students aware of how to use the words in the given context and where to use it. Through one theme the meaning of the word becomes clearer. In this article that idea is used as a base. The whole concept of story boxes revolves round this idea: ‘to connect the known to the unknown.
HOW TO PREPARE STORY BOXES?
It is quite interesting to make use of wastage as meaningful thing. For story boxes you can use any box: shoe box, pizza box, crockery box or initially; you can even use the plastic bags that can contain the things related to the story. Here in the article the instance of ‘Harry Porter is given. For that we can put a magic wand, pair of glasses, an envelope with a letter, a small finger puppet of an owl, and a train ticket in the shoe box. Then we can cover the box with the theme based paper or any simple paper and write down the name of the story on the box and also the name of the