Creating a personal narrative: EAL Lesson

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Creating written and oral stories. Image by Alex Wong sourced on Unsplashed

In English as an Additional Language (EAL), students used The Moth Education for creative inspiration to produce a personal narrative.  The task involved students writing their own narrative and then telling it to the class in a similar style to The Moth podcasts.

In class, we analysed the ‘shape’ of a story by listening to Dante’s narrative entitled The Prom and collaboratively drew the ‘shape’ to visualise how to set the scene and context, build events and characters, create a climax and a resolution.

Students then crafted their own story by drawing the shape of their events that included a personal challenge and a resolution that brought about a personal change or a new perspective on life.

Using their drawings students added literary devices to make their story engaging to an audience of readers. We then changed the written stories into spoken language that would be performed in front of a live audience.

In their performance, students considered their audience and ways to engage them using their voice, word choice, eye contact and body language.

This experience focused students’ learning on listening for the structure of a story and how to engage audiences in both their writing and their speaking.

To read these student’s stories and reflections please open the student blogs below:

Alex

May

Daisy

Lizzie

Jasmine

Charlene

Teaching Resources:

The Moth Podcasts

The Shape of A Story (has a useful drawing that I used in class as an exemplar)

Kurt Vonnegut believed that there is only one basic shape to a story but there are many variations to this basic shape.

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