Practicing speaking strategies with fairy tales

by Martine Olsborg

Most children have a relationship to fairy tales from either reading or watching the classical Disney movies. But why should we use fairy tales in school? The good thing about fairy tales is exactly the fact that the pupils are familiar with the stories. When the pupils have read or heard the fairy tales before in their mother tongue, it will be easier to understand the content of the same fairy tales in English. Another pro for fairy tales is the amount of repetition. When uncommon words occur, repetition is a great way to learn the new words. The fairy tales also have a rather concrete language that makes them suitable for pupils learning a new language. (Birketveit & Williams, 2013, p. 103)

One way to work with fairy tales is to do an interview. The pupils can work in pairs and have one role each from fairy tales they previously have worked with. For instance, one could be Snow White and the other could be the Wolf from Cinderella. Before the interview, the teacher should give the pupils some time to prepare. The pupils can for instance chose some topics to discuss, they can learn a few sentence starters and sample sentences from the teacher, and they can see an interview beforehand to know how the structure is. They will get one turn each at being the interviewer and the interviewee. This is a great way of practicing both speaking and listening strategies, but further on in this post I will focus on speaking strategies.

Juliet Munden has made a list of different speaking strategies. By doing an interview like this, the pupils can practice plenty of these strategies. I will not mention all of them, but a few of my choice. The first one is to take initiative. This one especially counts for the interviewer because he/she has to ask the questions. Another strategy is to practice what you want to say in your head before you say it. If the pupils have decided on a topic before the interview, this one is easier to do because they already have anticipations for both the questions and answers. One of the most important strategies (in my opinion) is to appreciate being corrected if you say something wrong. We learn a lot from our mistakes, and when learning a language it is natural to fail sometimes. When pupils correct each other, they both learn something and therefore it is a positive thing. (Munden, 2014, p. 204)

Fairy tales are fun for both pupils and teachers, and I think that this is a good way of working with characters and to practice different speaking strategies. Do you have any other ideas on how to practice speaking strategies with fairy tales? If so, please leave a comment!

Sources
- Anna Birketveit and Gweno Williams. (2013). Literature for the English classroom. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget Vigmostad & Bjørke AS.
- Juliet Munden. (2014). Engelsk på mellomtrinnet. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag AS.
- "Snow white disney" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Snow_white_disney.png#/media/File:Snow_white_disney.png