The Smartest Giant in Town

From Reading Pictures to Understanding a Story in the Foreign Language 
by Annet Kaminski

• Theoretical background: 

This reading is about a research done on a 24-student Primary class whose main objective was to prove the impact that pictures have on children’s understanding of a story during their first encounter with the picturebook The Smartest Giant in Town.

While observing pupils’ behaviour along all the storytelling sessions, it was found some influential factors that promote children’s English language learning and, above all, foster their speaking skills development:

- The frequency of occurrence of the word in the story.

- The helpfulness of the context.
- The frequency of occurrence of the word in pictorial representation.

At the end of such research (12 months later), students were interviewed in a comfortable atmosphere so that they could express themselves confidently in English. These interviews consisted of displaying some cards with the parts of the story and the characters. Children had to speak about these cards and say what aspects of the storytelling activity they liked or disliked. 

The main objective of this research was to prove that students remembered the story despite children had just been told it just once in class. Then, it was proved that 12 months after the first encounter with the book, children partially remembered the story. So, we can consider that picturebooks work as scaffoldings to a better understanding of the story.

• Activities: 

If we had to implement The Smartest Giant in Town in class, we would do in a 4th-grade Primary class (9-10 years old). We would take advantage of such picturebook in order to work some visual aspects which are not taken into account durint the above research. 

- During the story: 

Realia activity.

While telling the story, it would be a great idea to bring some realia in order to introduce new vocabulary. For instance, there are a lot of words related to clothes which may be worked by bringing real material: a shirt, a tie, trousers... The objective is to get children totally involved in the story. 

Let's work emotions.

Feelings and emotions are an important aspect when telling stories, since it is relevant that children develop their empathy. That's why we will give some small banners showing happy, sad or worried faces. We will ask them in every story scene how the characters may feel so that they raise their banners according to what expressions or gestures are displayed by the characters. Children will also have to justify why they consider that the characters feel like that. 

- At the end of the story: 

Match the giant's clothes with the animals. 

First of all, we will prove if students have understood the story when it comes to vocabulary. That's why, they will be given some cards displaying the giant's clothes which appeared in the book. Pupils will have to classify such cards by sticking them on a worksheet which will show the different animals the giant helps during the story. 

Let's work the story backgrounds. 

Due to the fact that picturebooks contains a lot of details such as beautiful backgrounds and characters, it may be interesting to workd them. For this reason, an outstanding activity would be to work on some details that appear in the book (the colour of the different houses, some tiny objects, the weather...).

Pupils in pairs will be given some pictures taken from the book; they will have to find them in the picturebook (like Where is Willy?). We should highlight that children will have the PDF version of the story so that all of them can succesfully complete the activity . 

Let's work values. 

Like emotions, values are also important to work in class, since students must learn to live together with other people which may be different to them. The last page of The Smartest Giant in Town shows how all the animal the giant has helped thank him his kindness. It is here where we would like to work values by asking students some questions like the following: 

Why do the animals give the giant a box? 

Why does the giant want to change his appearance with new clothes?

Can animals, giants and people live together in the same city? 

It is quite probable that students answer some question in Spanish/Catalan or speaking just a few English words. However, the aim is to engage them to express themselves independently their difficulties, since what we want to achieve firstly is students to get rid of their shyness and unconfidence.

My educative experience as a reader

As a child, I don't remember to have read any English book or story at school, which is a pity because storytelling would have been a good way of engaging children to love reading. In my case, I have always loved reading thanks to my parents' positive attitude towards books. However, I started to read short stories at Secondary School. Specifically, some of the books I remember are "Frankenstein" and  "Scarlet". I must highlight that I had no guidance when reading such books or stories, since I had to read them at home in order to pass an exam; my reading comprehension is the unique point which was tested by my teachers. Therefore, I couldn't find the meaning or sense of reading English stories. Indeed, it was a challenge for me in terms of learning new vocabulary and understanding the plot, but it was not useful at all, educatively talking. 

As an adult, I took up reading English books 4 years ago for pleasure. I thought I couldn't finish a book written in a foreign language, but one day I did! What's more, I learnt a lot of new expressions and cultural facts I had no idea by then. Some of such books are "The Giver" (Lois Lowry) and "Paper Towns" (John Green). 

As an English teacher at an academy, I have the same problem I had as a child: I have not chances of implementing reading as a pleasurable task in class, since every student has his/her "Oxford" or "Cambridge" workbooks. Such books have plenty of readings adapted to their English level or ages, but they are not  motivating enough for pupils, given that these are constantly testing students' reading skills. That's why I would like to incorporate storytelling in my classes, so I love stories for children. Actually, I consider that storytelling let teachers create a special atmosphere that other methodologies cannot. 

Doing research at university (last session), I found an interesting methodology I wouldn't hesitate to put into practice in the future: planning story based-lessons. This consists of planning a whole lesson based on a storybook or reading; for instance, it can be planned a CLIL lesson about the water cycle by using a story about a water drop that travels around the world as a starting point. Such methodology implies go from global contents to specific ones, which means retelling some parts of the story in a variety of ways. Here you may find lots of ideas to plan a story based-lesson: 

https://storyarts.org/lessonplans/index.html 

To sum up, I would absolutely like to implement more reading activities in my English classes in order to motivate children to learn and improve their English skills by reading. Moreover, I consider that emotions and culture are important when learning a new language; without them, we couldn't communicate meaningful ideas. So, storytelling and other reading methodologies should be implemented in class so as to avoid what happened to many children like me: growing up without having found a meaningful reason to read English stories.