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Grammar Stories: A Proposal for the Narrativization of Abstract Contents
Serena Zampolli
Università degli Studi di Genova
Abstract. This research study revolves around the development of a process to transform abstract concepts into stories. Specifically, it works on the grammar rules of English which prove to be problematic for Italian learners of English as a foreign language. This study argues that content in story-form is better processed by the human brain compared to non-narrative content, and highlights how the discussion on narrativization of abstract content is still open. The proposed process could be the first step towards a new representation of abstract knowledge and possibly towards the automated creation of metaphorical stories.
Keywords. Narrativization, Language Learning, Narrative Learning, Storytelling
1 Introduction
This research study is being developed at the University of Genoa (Italy), within the PhD program on Digital Humanities. It intertwines storytelling and language teaching, exploring the possibilities offered by visual narratives of facilitating the memorization of English grammar rules.
The target learners are Italian teenagers and adults, who live in their home country and study or practice English as a foreign language [1], therefore relying mostly on explicit memory [16][7].
Grammar rules are abstract concepts and difficult to be mentally visualized by learners. This might be the reason it seems often difficult for foreign learners to retrieve and apply these pieces of information while talking and even writing [19]. The present study investigates the outcomes of changing the way grammar rules are presented, in order to observe if this betters their retrieval and application.
Extensive study of the literature highlighted the necessity to find a way to help learners to visualize the grammar rules, and the benefit of doing so by means of narrative. Stories are the easiest form for our brain to process information and knowledge, and have always constituted a powerful ally in the delivery of content in education.
This PhD project aims to design a narrativization technique which could help learners retain and apply the rules, until the linguistic process is automatized in the brain and no longer needs memory aids. This study is intended to serve English teachers in their work, as well as adolescent and adult learners of English as a foreign language.
Once accomplished and widely tested, this technique could also constitute the basis for the creation of automated procedures to narrativize abstract contents.
2 Towards a Meaningful Narrativization of Abstract Contents
Our brain is hardwired to deal with stories. [15] [13] In fact, storytelling has played a crucial role in the development of our species, [9] to the point studies have proved we understand the world around us [2] [3] and organize our memories [15] in story-form.
The grammar rules of a foreign language are abstract information. They are not framed into story-form, but embedded in a web of associations. [5] When a learner of a foreign language does not live in a country where that language is spoken or is not exposed to it consistently, the grammar rule can not be reinforced by usage and its retention in memory relies on the explicit memory. Being not framed into story form, their retention is weaker [10][11], and without reinforcement is very likely to fade and disappear from memory with time. This might be the reason why learners of a foreign language often seem to not be able to apply rules they know.
Moreover, our brain relies strongly on visuals. A proof of this comes from the world of professional mnemonists, who enhance their memory by using techniques, like the method of loci, where they consciously convert information into images. This change of format allows the information to become concrete, and therefore memorable. [8]
It seems very appropriate to consider presenting abstract information in story form: not only they become easier for the brain to process, they also have the power to create mental images through words, allowing the transfer of concepts from one mental domain to another. Moreover, sensory details create images that allow trans-domain neural mapping within the mind of the story receiver [9]. This result can be argued to be even more at hand if the story is told not only via words, but using multimedia artifacts, and current technology allows learners to be both viewers and creators of multimedia products such as videos.
For all these reasons, giving abstract information a visual and narrative form seems a profitable way to facilitate their retention. However, despite the consistent amount of research about the advantages of the narrative form, stories are still not used much in education when it comes to the teaching of abstract concepts and a process to narrativize abstract contents effectively is still to be defined.
This PhD dissertation is an attempt in this direction, with a particular interest for educational and cognitive outcomes of the designed process. The research intertwines four main theoretical domains. Each of them is related to all the others, as shown in Fig.1., where all relations are characterized with their main theoretical reference:
Fig. 1. Theoretical Framework Model
The research methodology mixes literature review with experimentations in schools and in informal learning situations of a proposal to narrativize abstract grammatical contents.
3 Current Status and Further Steps
At the present time, the theoretical framework has been widely explored and a narrativization procedure has been developed. This is the result of a series of development steps: firstly, a story narrativizing one grammar rule was created and presented in video form; this production was analyzed, schematized and then the process was reapplied to another rule, which highlighted the need to improve the narrativization procedure. Other attempts followed, supported by both experience and an extended study of storytelling techniques [12] and narratology [20], up to reach a form that could be successfully applied to a variety of different grammar rules.
During a first exploratory application in school, the procedure was taught to first year’s high school students They were all able to apply it to English grammar rules and produce visual stories delivering the requested linguistic information. The same laboratory will now be repeated in three other classes, in order to gather data on its replicability and effectivity as learning aid in different educational contexts.
At the same time, an experimentation on adults informally learning English as a foreign language is being conducted: volunteers are showed some videos narrativizing grammar rules, and their appreciation and possible learning gains will be investigated via self-evaluation questionnaires. This experimentation aims to investigate if receiving such stories, rather than creating them as in the school-based experimentations, can also be helpful to understand and memorize abstract concepts.
The narrativization procedure developed focuses on grammar rules, but it can constitute a first step towards a meaningful narrativization of abstract contents of other kinds. To this end, it will be necessary to design a step-by-step procedure that can work on diverse types of abstract information. This is why the next step is to test the validity of the proposed procedure extensively and evaluate its impact on learning. Extensive texting, moreover, would offer the opportunity to build a corpus of visual components of different kinds, suitable to embodying linguistic elements. If the process will prove valid to work on grammar rules, its application could be possibly extended and adapted to other knowledge areas dealing with abstraction.
The outcomes of this study, therefore, are expected to constitute a useful starting point towards automating the creation of stories effectively representing abstract concepts.
Reference
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16. Solomon, Y., O’Neill, J. (1998). “Mathematics and Narrative”. In Language and Education. Volume 12, 1998. Issue 3. Pages 210-221.
18. Swan, M., Smith, B. (Eds.). (2001). Learner English (2nd Edition) A teacher’s guide to interference and other problems (Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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