Table 1: Story-telling vs. List-learning

FU = follow-up, one week later

Experiment 2: Story-telling plus Skill-building vs. Story-telling Alone

Subjects were 58 first year Japanese female students at a junior college in Osaka who had had very little exposure to aural input in English. One class (n = 27) was a story only group (Story-Only Group) and the other class (n = 31) was a story plus supplementary activities group (Story-Plus Group)

The Story-Only group experienced the following method:

(1) The 20 target words from a story ("The Three Little Pigs") were written on the board in front of the class.

(2) The participants took a translation test (pretest) on these 20 words. (5 minutes) They were asked to write the meaning in Japanese for each English word on the list.

(3) The students put down the paper and the pencil and listened to the story, which contained the target words. (15 minutes)

(4) After listening to the story the participants took the posttest on the same list of the words. (5 minutes)

The Story-Plus group experienced the following method:

(1) through (3) were identical to the method followed by the Story-Only group.

(4) The teacher asked oral comprehension questions that used the target words and that were asked in a way that the target words had to be used to answer the questions. (10 minutes)

(5) The participants took the same translation test again. (mid-test, 5 minutes)

(6) After taking the test, the participants exchanged test papers with their neighbor and checked the answers with the teacher, who gave the correct answers in Japanese. (10 minutes)

(7) The students read a written version of the story. They were asked to underline the words they wanted to learn including the target words. (10 minutes)

(8) The participants told the same story to their study partner. They were encouraged not to refer to the text, but to use the target words that were on the board. (20 minutes)

(9) The participants took the same translation test again as the posttest. (5 minutes)

(10) The teacher gave the correct answers for the test. (5 minutes).

The Story-Plus group spent almost the entire class time (85 minutes) hearing the story and doing different activities as described above. The Story-Only group listened to the story for only 15 minutes.

There was little interaction between the teacher and the participants during the story telling. The participants saw the words on the board and took the pre-test which primed them to notice the words and pay attention to the words during the storytelling. When the participants looked uncertain, the teacher clarified the meaning of the words using drawings or verbal explanations.

Note that the Story-Only group took the translation test twice, but the Story- Plus group took it three times. In addition, both groups were given an unexpected follow-up test five weeks later.

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