Pace: a story-Based Approach for Dialogic Inquiry about Form

P: PRESENTATION of Meaningful Language

This first step of PACE represents the Presentation phase of a story; fairy tales, folktales, and legends work well, since they are inherently interesting, thought provoking, and integrate cultural values that have withstood the test of time. Although we strongly suggest the use of stories, PACE lessons may integrate other text-types, such as an authentic listening segment, an authentic document, or a demonstration of a real-life task, such as playing a sport, preparing a meal, or conducting a science experiment. Even materials from a textbook chapter (narratives, dialogues, stories) may be adapted if they reflect cultural ideas, are interesting, and are episodically organized. Episodically organized stories are written with stageable actions and events that are well-suited for presentation, since the meanings of these texts can be made transparent and comprehensible through presenting pictures of the plot in sequence, acting out specific actions as the story is being told, or dramatizing parts of the story’s plot using student actors. Given that this text will be foreshadowing a future grammar conversation, the grammatical feature should appear often in the text and be used naturally and meaningfully. Stories written and published for non-instructional purposes are particularly good examples of texts that contain a high degree of natural repletion. In contrast, teacher prepared stories that have as the ultimate goal the presentation of a grammatical structure will always result in texts that use the target form in forced and unnatural ways. After all, most teachers are not professional writers. In most all cases, teachers’ texts are motivated for illustrating grammar structures rather than for entertaining, teaching important life lessons, or transmitting cultural values, beliefs, and perspectives in a narrative structure. In the presentation phase, the teacher presents the story, assisting the students with comprehension and the acquisition of meaning and form relationships; students typically do not see the written script of the story in this phase. The Presentation does not consist of isolated, disconnected sentences, illustrating the pre-selected target form in question; rather, it is presented in a narrative intended to capture learner interest and provide opportunities for the teacher to create comprehension through various meaning making and negotiation strategies. As was previously mentioned but worth pointing out again, care needs to be taken to ensure that the presentation naturally and sufficiently illustrates the grammatical point in question and that the story and target structure are appropriate to the learners’ actual and potential levels of development, as instruction in the ZPD requires. The structure should appear often enough during the Presentation to be salient to learners, without making the language sound unnatural or stilted. The Presentation phase of the PACE lesson should be an interactive experience with the class and not a teacher-fronted presentation of the story with students listening passively in their seats. By creating student participation in the storytelling event, teachers can guide learners through the new element of the language to be learned. Student participation during the presentation of the text may take the form of learner repetitions of key phrases cued by the teacher during a storytelling session, thumbs up/down comprehension checks to the teacher’s periodic questions intended to see if students are following the story line, the use of student actors to portray the events of the story as it is told, cloze exercises based on listening segments, K–W–L activities (K–W–L activities are a way to organize classroom tasks around learners’ background knowledge and their goals for learning. From the learners’ perspective, K stands for what I know already; W stands for what I want to know; and L stands for what I have learned ) or questions that ask students to anticipate what will happen next. The goal here is to enable learners to stretch their language abilities by comprehending new elements of the target language in meaningful texts, through the mediation of the teacher during storytelling. The Presentation phase may last for part of a class, an entire class session, or even across several class sessions, depending on the story and the sequencing of its presentation. For example, a storytelling lesson should be planned using a three-step procedure involving pre-storytelling, while-storytelling, and post-storytelling activities. These three steps need to become a habit of mind and may include focusing on prior knowledge, identifying and explaining cultural references needed to comprehend the story, teaching important vocabulary to assist comprehension, dramatization while or after the story is told, pair-work comprehension checks, or story retelling activities.