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Articles |
Bilingual folk stories in the ESL classroom
Mike Baynham is a lecturer in Adult Literacy and Basic Education at the Lee Centre, Goldsmiths' College, London. He is currently doing research on the sociolinguistics of second-language use, including story telling in a second language, based on conversations with members of the Moroccan community in London.
This article' will begin with a brief review of current work in developing bilingual and monolingual reading materials based on traditional folk stories. It will also briefly refer to studies of story telling occurring in the course of conversations. It will then describe the process by which a Mullah Nasreddin story, told by Manejieh, a student from Iran, during a discussion in a post-elementary ESL classroom, is worked on, first by Manejieh, then by other members of the group in order to produce a ‘finished version’ in English. Manejieh then translates the finished version into Farsi. The two versions of the story are then taped and the written texts produced as a booklet, suitable for use with elementary ESL students. This activity is looked at both as ‘process’, involving students in a variety of learning activities while working on the stories, and also as ‘product’, producing reading materials developed by a post-elementary student suitable for use with beginning students, both speakers of Farsi and from other language groups.