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論文
論文

Stories and Foreign Language Learning
Stephen M. Ryan1)
Keywords: Stories, Foreign Language Learning, Brain Science
The power of stories used for educational purposes has been recognised throughout
history. It is power that draws on some of the most basic elements of the humanexperience: the desire to make sense of the world; the impulse to share experiences withothers; and the extraordinary influence of emotions over our lives. This paper willattempt to document the impact of stories on the human mind, to explore theirconnections to learning, and to suggest uses for stories in the foreign language classroom.
The Power of Stories
The use of stories to transmit knowledge has deep and far-reaching roots in humancivilisation. A cave painting from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi shows the story of a
pig and buffalo hunt. It has been found to be around 44,000 years old (Aubert et al., 2019).
Religious knowledge, the oldest and longest-lasting kind of knowledge we have, is often
encoded in stories: whether it be the stories of the Old Testament, the epic tales of the
Hindu classics (Dutt, 2017), the riddle-like stories of Zen Buddhism (Senzaki, 2010), or
the parables of Muhammad (Turan, 2011) or Jesus. The common sense needed to keeppeople safe has often been passed from generation to generation through the use ofchildren’s stories with clear messages, such as “Do not go into the woods alone” or“beware of things that are not what they appear to be.” Indeed, when a group of engineers,
anthropologists, nuclear physicists, and behavioural scientists were tasked with finding
a way of warning people up to 10,000 years into the future that certain places, where
nuclear waste is buried, are lethally dangerous, they recommended encoding that
information into stories and establishing a “nuclear priesthood” of storytellers to passthem on from generation to generation (Human Interference Taskforce, 1984).
The use of stories in education, both formal and informal, is also well-documented.
It has been called the oldest form of education (Gottschal, 2013). Fables, stories with an
explicitly didactic message, have been a means of education all over the world (seeUsbourne Publishing, 2017) and were passed on orally long before they were written
down (Harrison, 2016). The last third of the twentieth century saw a plethora of studies
confirming the efficacity of storytelling in a variety of educational settings and for anumber of subjects: with learning-disabled children (Garnett, 1986); for learning1)

山陽学園大学総合人間学部言語文化学科
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Ryan:: Stories and Foreign Language Learning

mathematics (Borasi et al., 1990); science (Marin & Miller, 1988); psychology (Corey &McMichael, 1974); and language arts (Peck, 1989); as well as a number of investigations
linking storytelling and pedagogy in general (eg. Egan, 1989; Halpin & Halpin, 1982).
It is no surprise, then, that stories have also been used to good effect in foreign

language teaching. Morgan and Rinvolucri’s Once Upon a Time: Using Stories in the

Language Classroom (1984) both inspired a generation of teachers to share stories with

their students and provided activities for doing so, a tradition continued by such

publications as Wright’s Storytelling with Children (2009). The well-documented successof Extensive Reading programmes around the world (Nation, 1997; Ng et al., 2019; Tien,
2015) and consequent availability of a large number of graded readers, both fiction andnon-fiction, from major publishers, can be largely attributed to the popularity andeffectiveness of using stories as a way of learning a language. Nishizawa et al. (2010) for
example, found that high school students who participated in a four-year Extensive
Reading course showed gains on the TOEIC test equivalent to those of classmates who
had studied abroad for a year. Beyond the world of Extensive Reading, in a literature
review, Lucarevschki (2016) documents a wide range of specific skills, as well as generallanguage proficiency, which show significant improvements as a result of the use ofstories in language learning.
Why?
It is becoming clear that the remarkable power of stories to support and enhancelearning has its roots in the fact that they play to many of the strengths of the humanbrain when it comes to learning. They evoke emotion, a prerequisite for learning; they
always have an element of sharing, which draws on the brain’s propensity to learn better
when there is a social element; they follow one of a limited number of narrative patterns,
feeding the brain’s relentless quest to find and remember predictable elements of its
environment; and they tend to make sense, resulting in the release of memory-enhancing
neurotransmitters when the brain makes sense of any part of the world.
EmotionStories evoke emotion. What distinguishes a story from a recitation of facts is theauthor’s intent to stimulate one or more emotions in the reader. Some genres, such as
comedies and tragedies, are distinguished entirely by the emotion they bring. Others are
more complex: a romance can involve the whole gamut of emotions from elation todepression with humour, frustration, and envy often added to further engage the reader.
A mystery story plays on our desire for completion but often uses other emotions along
the way, too. A story that leaves the reader unmoved is rather a pointless story.
This is in marked contrast to the rather emotion-less schoolrooms in which weusually expect our students to learn their lessons. Once they get through withkindergarten, classroom décor is likely to become more and more neutral. As theseriousness of their studies increases, emotion is drained out of them. A teacher may add
a little humour or even pathos to a lesson but this is decidedly extracurricular. Moments
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山陽論叢 第 28 巻 （2021）(2021)of panic or stress may come during a lesson but rather than helping students to learn,these moments, and the shot of cortisol that accompanies them, are more likely to focus
attention on whatever is causing the stress or panic than on the lesson itself (Kelly, 2021).
Yet, without emotion, there can be no learning (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007).
Emotional valence acts as a label attached to a particular experience or piece of
information. The label tags the experience as “important” and it is important things thatare stored in long-term memory. Without an emotional tag, the brain would not knowthat the experience was important and therefore worth remembering. This is why weremember things that surprise, excite, cheer, or depress us and not the thousands ofother experiences that make up a day but do not evoke any particular emotion.
The emotions stimulated by stories, then, help us to remember not only the eventsof the stories but also the language in which they are told. It is precisely because theystir our emotions that stories help us to learn.
Sharing
Storytelling involves sharing on several different levels. Whether the story is heard
or read, storyteller and audience share the narrative, they share the emotions evoked by
the story, and they share meanings. At the same time, the community of hearers/readers
share with each other the experience of the unwinding of the story, its twists and turn,and its eventual resolution.
When a teacher or author shares a story with students, the experience transcends
the walls of the classroom. It brings in elements of experience that are not normally partof spoken or written classroom discourse. Instead of exercises and language samples
designed to accustom learners to various elements of the language, a narrative can bringthem a whole world of experienced packaged in the language they are studying.
The discourse itself, the narrative shape of the story, the way in which various
elements are presented and the story progresses towards its conclusion, may be basedon a shared understanding about how stories should develop. If it is familiar, thatfamiliarity will guide them towards an understanding of the language used to tell thestory, offering a well-trodden path to walk as they encounter new words and usages (forfurther discussion of the uses of familiarity, see the following section on Patterns). If thenarrative form is an unfamiliar one, the story will serve to share with the learners
experience of a genre that is used in the target language but which they have not yet
encountered on their own.
The contents of the story, the people and things described, their encounters,
attitudes, and reactions, combine to produce, for the people with whom it is shared, aholistic view of situations in which the target language is used. Instead of studying,memorising, and practicing fragments of the language, stories share a whole slice of life
(however fantastic or true-to-life that slice might be) experienced entirely through theforeign language. In this sense, stories have much in common with other holistic
approaches to language learning through use, such as Drama (Almond, 2005; Hillyard,2015) and Task-Based Language Learning (Ellis, 2019; Willis & Willis, 2007).
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At a deeper level, the act of telling and hearing/reading a story forms a sharedemotional bond between teller and hearer/reader. As professional story-teller Deepa
Kiran says: “When we listen to another’s story, we are no longer strangers” (2016). As
learners follow the vicissitudes of a plot, they cannot help but be emotionally engaged
with the story and its teller . Indeed, there is evidence that patterns of brain activation,
as measured by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, synchronise in the brains ofteller and hearer during oral story telling (Stephens et al., 2010). The centrality ofemotion to learning has already been highlighted in a previous section of this paper. Hereit is the sharing of emotion that is significant.
Sharing stories has an even more profound effect than that as it engages the social
element of learning which is often absent in classroom-based teaching. Lieberman (2013)
reports the presence of a “social learning network” in the brain which is engaged when
we learn from, with, or for other people and which operates independently from the“analytical learning network” which is engaged when we analyse and memorise byourselves, as often happens in formal educational settings. He presents evidence thatthe social network is a more powerful tool for learning than the analytical network but
is usually inactive when analytical learning is attempted. So, the sharing between
storyteller and audience and between fellow audience members, because of its social
nature, may in itself be a powerful stimulus to learning.
The sharing of meaning that occurs through stories is of particular relevance tolanguage learners. One often hears of terms and expressions, such as giri (Japanese),chutzpah (Yiddish), or Schadenfreude (German) that are said to be untranslatable fromtheir source language into another. The claim that they cannot be translated, however,does not mean that they cannot be expressed and communicated to people unfamiliar
with the source language: very often their meaning is conveyed through illustrative
stories or anecdotes. Even the apparently irreducible meaning of intensely personal
experiences can be conveyed through the telling of stories, as famously exemplified byProust (1913-1927) in his account of his personally significant ingesting of madeleines

or by Bulgakov (1967) in his fictionalisation of the emotions evoked by the smell of his
mother’s borscht.

The importance of the ability of shared stories to lead to sharing of meaning is

becoming clearer as neuroscience reveals that the meanings and associations of evenmundane words (such as dog, house, or friend) are stored in the brain not in a single

place for each word but broken down into different elements of the experience they evoke(the sound, shape, smell, fell, etc. of a dog) and that these elements, all activated by thesingle word dog are stored in different parts of the brain (Bundell, 2016). The significanceof this becomes clear when we realise that it is our personal experience of dogs that wires
these areas of our brain to react to the word dog in this way. Since each brain is wired

differently (by the variability of human experience), shared meaning, even between usersof the same language, is not easily achieved. Obviously, this is even more true of
emergent users of a language, for whom the L1 associations of a word can be very4

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different from those of its so-called equivalent in the foreign language. The richness ofopportunities that stories offer for contextualisation of meaning is a vital antidote to theshorthand classroom technique of having learners remember that dog = chien = Hund =inu and so on.
Patterns

Unlike our ongoing experience of the world around us, stories have a structure. On
the most simplistic level this consists of them having a beginning, a middle, and an end.
In slightly more detailed terms, all stories are considered to be analysable in the termsof Freytag’s pyramid (Freytag, 1863), in that they have an Exposition, a period of Rising
Action, a Climax, a period of Falling Action, and a Resolution. Within this overall
framework, specific genres (romance, comedy, tragedy) have their own structures andconventions (Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010). Although these conventions are not always
followed by authors and storytellers, the act of ignoring them and subverting a reader’s
expectations (as when, for example, a murder case is not resolved at the end of a detective
story) is a confirmation that expectations about the structure of a genre exist.
Compared to the patterned structures of and within stories, the stream of
information about the world around us reaching our senses, and through our senses, ourbrains, is anarchic and apparently formless. Zimmerman (1986) has estimated that theamount of information available to a person’s senses at any given moment is equivalent
to some 11 million bits. This information reaches us in a completely unstructured way,amounting to a constant buzz of data which, unlike the information in stories, has noclear shape or form. The difficulty of making sense of all this data is compounded by thefact that the bandwidth of our senses (to continue the computer analogy) is severely
limited: Zimmerman’s (1986) estimate is that human beings can deal with only 40 of
those 11 million bits at any one time. Just knowing what to pay attention to is anenormous task (unlike in stories where the storyteller has any number of rhetoricaldevices to draw attention to significant information).
And yet, humans as a species have learnt to survive and thrive in an environment
full of threats and dangers and with bodies which are dependent for their survival on
taking in resources from their surroundings (air, water, food). We have learned to makeenough sense of the unstructured information around us not only to get by but to exploit
our environment in ways that have made us the dominant species on the planet.
In order to do this, our brains have learned to bring structure to our experience of
the world, by finding patterns in the data we receive. In fact, the brain has been
described as a pattern-detection machine (Kurzweil, 2012), with large parts of its
processing devoted to this task. The widespread use of functional Magnetic ResonanceImaging machines over the last 20 years has revealed that, even when the brain isapparently at rest, it is searching through memories of sensory data looking for patterns(Lieberman, 2013). We are only momentarily conscious of this, when we wake from a
dream and partly remember some impossible combination of events that was in our head
before we woke: this is a residual trace of the brain’s ongoing search for patterns.
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What makes the detection of patterns so important is that finding patterns in pastexperience is the only guide we have to what will happen in the future. Patterns allow
us to make predictions about the future and those predictions are essential to thesurvival of our bodies. Whether it is the angry bull charging toward us, the irresistible
collection of candy around us, or the man with an out-stretched hand walking up to us,
our bodies need to make predictions to produce the requisite bodily reactions to deal withwhat is likely to happen next: adrenaline for the approaching bull; insulin to deal withthe sugar overload; and glucose to certain muscles to prepare them to contract or expandin order to shake the offered hand. Predictions, and the detection of patterns that makes
them possible, are essential to both our physical and social survival.
The evolutionary origins of this pattern/prediction nexus are not hard to imagine:
those who learnt to do this survived to pass on their genes to future generations andthose who did not did not. Within the individual organism, this nexus is driven by thebrain’s reward system, principally the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Dopamine evokes feelings of pleasure in the body and is used by the brain as reward andencouragement for actions that are conducive to the survival of the body (Iversen et al.,2009), like exercise, meditation, or a good night’s sleep. It is used to reward sense-making
behaviour, like pattern detection and prediction, since this is also a survival mechanism.
Finding a patterns in sensory data is rewarded by a release of dopamine, as is making a
successful prediction about what will happen next (Schulz, 1998). Both searching for, butfailing to find, a pattern and making a prediction that turns out to be erroneous are also
rewarded by dopamine release (Schulz, 2016), presumably because making successful
predictions requires a willingness to make unsuccessful ones.
Stories, then, because they are structured, play directly to the way in which thebrain deals with sensory data. Our brain’s search for pattern and structure will easily
lead to the pleasure of a dopamine release when reading or listening to a story because,
unlike the normal flow of sensory data, stories consist of rather obvious patterns, bothin the arc of their plots and in the way individual details within the stories are structured.
In the case of detective or mystery stories, the way in which the storyteller moves
towards the revelation at the end of the story is pleasurable because it gives us a chance
to predict the denouement; it then brings us further pleasure as our prediction of the end
turns out either to be correct or, if it is incorrect, at least our expectation that there will
be a denouement which takes account of the facts presented will be fulfilled. The sameis true of anecdotes, fables, and many other genres.
In the language classroom, the pleasure of recognising narrative patterns and of
predicting future events in a story can become associated with the words used to tell thestory. This is because, as well as providing pleasure, dopamine has the function of fixing
in memory the circumstances under which that pleasure was experienced (Iversen et al.,2009). So, hearing or reading stories in the target language brings both pleasure andlearning, thanks to the pattern-recognition and prediction functions it enables.
It has been further suggested that stories can function as a training ground for the6- 54 -

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brain’s pattern-recognition skills (Kurzweil, 2012). Just as experts in Artificial
Intelligence are training machines to detect patterns by presenting them with very
simple patterns and gradually increasing the complexity, stories may help train ourlearners in the skills they will need to make sense of the world. It has also been suggested
that readers seek solace in the structured world of stories from the confusing world of
direct experience (see, for example, Sobhan, 2020).
How?
Language teachers already use stories as part of their teaching: the personal
anecdote, the individual reading time, the extensive reading programme, the narrative
essay. Given the power of stories to play to the brain’s strengths and cement learning,
through their evocation of emotion, opportunities for sharing, and reliance on patterns,
it may be worth considering how stories can be integrated into every part of the language
learning curriculum.
Reading
Learners read stories in the target language. Stories are not limited to fiction. Nonfiction accounts can also be cast in narrative style, as they usually are in biographiesand many historical accounts. They can use stories for intensive language study, for the
study of discourse and narrative structure, for literary appreciation, or for the sheer
pleasure of reading.
Reading tends to be regarded as a rather solitary activity, but Lieberman’s (2013)
work on the Social Brain confirms not only that a story shared is a pleasure doubled but
also that reading a story in order to share enhances the learning occasioned by the story.
Opportunities should be made, then, for learners to share the stories they have read withothers. They can do this through traditional book reports, through writing reviews foronline booksellers, or by turning the classroom into a kind of book club where “sharingtime” allows learners to tell each other about the books they have read, explain why they
liked them, and make recommendations to each other.
Speaking and Listening
Daily life in a classroom offers a plethora of opportunities for sharing stories: theteacher shares a personal anecdote; a learner is asked to explain why they are late forclass; learners can be encouraged to string newly-learned vocabulary into a story andshare it (a powerful mnemonic in itself); they can re-tell or reconstruct a story from atextbook or from visual materials; the teacher can establish a regular story time where
each learner is a storyteller, encouraged to reach new imaginative heights.
Special events can be arranged, including a visit by a noted story-teller or author,
an exchange of video-taped stories with a class in another country, or a story-tellingcompetition among learners.
Writing“Let’s write a story” may seem like an activity that is best suited to children’sclasses, but “narrative” is also one of the five main essay genres (along with: expository,
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argumentative, persuasive, and descriptive) taught to university students in their native
language (see, for example, Gill, 2014). Learners can write stories for their teachers toread, for their classmates, to be posted online, for entry into contests and competitions,for publication in the classroom, in the school or beyond.
Presentation and Discussion
Stories are often used to persuade, thanks to their emotional content. As such,they are well suited for use in a presentation or discussion class. They also tend to beremembered better and longer than a simple presentation of facts, because of both theemotions evoked and the dopamine released.
If students are taught that stories are the best way to persuade an audience of thevalidity of what is being presented to them or to alter the opinions of a discussion partner,
they will readily take to storytelling as persuasion because of the familiarity they havewith narrative forms. The author has had some success re-casting his Presentation
course as a Storytelling course: the basic elements and products of the course are still
the same but the task of making a presentation is re-cast as “Let’s tell a story that will
present this information.” This takes the focus away from the mechanics of making slides
and memorising scripts and re-formulates the task as one of engaging and swaying an
audience both emotionally and logically and helping them to remember points that havebeen made.
This approach should also be kept in mind when it is the teacher who needs tomake a presentation, maybe on some aspect of the history or ways of life of a country
where the foreign language is spoken. Students who attend the presentation are more
likely to be engaged by it and to remember what has been said if it is cast as a story thanas a series of facts.
Integrating Approaches
Based on the recognition that language use is a holistic experience and not just theaccumulation of a number of discrete skills (reading, writing, etc.), a number ofintegrating approaches to language learning have been developed that draw on the
power of stories. These include the use of drama, simulations, and role-plays. Learners
may be asked to draw on all their languages skills to create and perform an enactmentof events based on reality or on their imagination.
Task-Based

Language

Teachingis

another

integrating

approachwhich

incorporates the power of stories to have learners use their language to carry out nonlinguistic tasks, often based on stories of real or fictitious situation. A notable example

is The Snoop Detective School Conversation Book (Kelly, 1995), in which learners arepresented with a series of fictitious crime scenes and must use their language skills tosolve the mystery and identify the criminal.
Concluding Words

The true power of stories is their ability to transcend our mundane existence. They
take us out of our current situation and place us in the middle of event which, however8- 56 -

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temporarily confusing they may seem, eventually make sense. They take us out of
ourselves emotionally because we cannot help but react to the inhabitants of the story
world, their trials and triumphs, their mysteries and resolutions. Above all, they connect
us to other people, many of whom we will never meet: the storyteller, the characters inthe story, other readers or hearers of the same story, and, ultimately, the friends andacquaintances we feel compelled to re-tell the story to. Stories transcend and stories
connect.
As language teachers, we cannot afford to ignore the power of stories to enhance
our students’ learning.
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Acknowledgement. The seeds that grew into this paper were planted during thewriting of:

Kelly, C., & Ryan, S. M. (2021). Do you want to hear a story? Here’s why. The Power ofStorytelling in the Language Classroom. MindBrainEd Think Tanks, 7(4), 8-13.

I am grateful to my co-author for his permission to develop the ideas further in thispaper.

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