Forever stories: The
River in the Pines
Stories are the pith of our
existence: we tell stories to pass the time, we listen to or watch stories to
entertain ourselves or to excite our imagination or even to test our limits
(thrillers will do that for you). Books tell stories; poems can be narrative;
films show stories just about anything. There is a very basic feature in
stories: beginning, middle, end – though not all stories are told in this
strict order.
Reading or watching
stories has its unquestionable merits for language learners, but creating
stories brings together all kinds of skills learned and can be entertaining and
rewarding.
So this time I used a song
to elicit story-telling from my students. The song happens to be one of my
favourites though my criteria for choosing it were other than my personal
preferences.
The song is The River in the Pines by Joan Baez. It
tells the sad story of two star-crossed lovers who live in Wisconsin, him a
river boy and her a maiden.
It is evocative swaying
between spring and autumn, happiness and sorrow and engaging all our senses:
birds singing, cedars whispering, rapids pounding, birds twittering, a riot of
colour in spring and autumn, a cold gravestone where wild flowers are left and
smells of budding trees and a blooming rose all in one mind-boggling go.
This time I thought I
would tease my students’ brains by preparing a slide show and providing a key
word or phrase on each slide and asking them to compose a story on the basis of
the slide show. Working with the visual stimuli before the learners make up their
stories helps clear up some lexical or cultural issues that might detract from
the thorough enjoyment of the song while the key words facilitate production
but also per force maintain a certain level of language.
Students’ stories can be
read and shared in class or stuck on a noticeboard (traditional methods of
presentation still have their value) and finally the song can be played so that
the students can discuss how their tales relate to the one told by the song.
Here is the link for the
song.
And here is the slide show
turned to video.
Enjoy!
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