Storytelling into Understanding
THE STUDY
Lizabeth’s Early Stories
Lizabeth’s corpus consists of twelve stories, seven of which were told during sessions one through four. Five of the latter are what the systemicist Guenter Plum has termed Anecdotes, stories with entertainment value and a focus on the author’s reaction, as a participant, to the events described (Plum, 1988). Lizabeth’s Anecdotes are about specific past events that took place in her own classroom. The other participants are her students. These are What We Did One Day stories. Story 1, from session two, is characteristic of these texts. (Line divisions in this single-spaced format are arbitrary. Ellipses indicate repairs, or changes in sentence structure motivated by the speaker’s changing intentions.)
Story 1
I had an interesting thing happen Thursday with a Vietnamese boy who had been in an eighth-grade language arts class, but got put in my enriched seventh-grade language arts class. Smart, smart kid. Just like you’re talking about. Straight A’s, has, like, one hundred four percent in my class. But we were preparing for the TerraNova1. We did the little section where you had to read a little story and then answer questions about it. And I told them, “Always read the questions first. You have a purpose in reading. And then read this, and then. . . .” But his main struggle was with what’s the title of the story, what’s the main theme of the story. He really, really struggled with that, and I said, “Well, how long have you been speaking English?” “Eleven years.” [Laughs.] You know they taught me in my classes, seven years to be ... and he’s been here 11, and he’s still struggling. [Laughs.]
At the level of language features, the systemic approach to text analysis isolates what are called “transitivity patterns” in an effort to locate in very specific terms the field or subject matter of the text. Among other things, transitivity patterns identify story participants, who in Story 1 are named by the pronouns I, we, he, them, his, you (in direct address) and the noun phrase Vietnamese boy. Transitivity patterns also stipulate the “circumstances” described, which I am limiting to indicators of time within the verb (i.e., past, present, and future). Story 1 contains 20 verb phrases (in independent and dependent clauses), 15 of which describe past time. Only two verbs are modals, which in systemic and in many other approaches to language analysis act to create “an explicit dimension of speaker judgment” in the text (Eggins & Slade, p. 98).
Story 1 is thus a relatively straightforward text which covers territory already experienced by the narrator and situated in one of the most familiar contexts of her life. It contains little in the way of mechanisms that would distance the storyteller from her subject matter. Both of its primary participants, the Vietnamese student and his teacher, share the same reaction, frustration. The boy is confounded because he is unable to discern the theme of a story, the teacher because the boy cannot understand a story title despite his 11 years of residence in the U.S. This is a Principal-1 type, someone who is a teacher functioning in ways almost identical with the ways her students are functioning, rather than a teacher with an evaluative distance on her students. Story 1 is also notable for the absence of connections with the Study Group’s developing discussion of text analysis and the characteristics of L2 readers. The newer Discourse, TEACHING FMC, is nowhere apparent.
Lizabeth continued to relate Anecdotes with the same features through Study Group session four. Noteworthy, in addition, was the description of classroom activities which focused on discrete learning: worksheets, vocabulary lists, spelling tests. By the time of session five, Lizabeth was the only Study Group member who had not yet begun using FMC with her students. Eve, in the meantime, had made huge strides in her understanding of FMC and had had distinct success with it in the classroom.
1. A standardized reading test used by the school district.
