Stories are like magic. You start telling one, and whether your learners are children or adults, the room goes quiet and you get total attention.

But you get more as well. Extensive research, though mainly with native speakers, has shown that the information delivered in a story is learned more quickly and retained longer than through any other means, such as explanations, lectures, and even TV.

It might be easy to conclude that we retain more from stories because stories are more interesting. However, researchers from University of California (Graesser, Hoffman, & Clark, 1980) found that narrative texts were read about twice as fast as expository texts and remembered twice as well, but familiarity and interestingness only had a very small effect. There is another reason our brains love stories, and it has to do with the narrative format.

Stories can also be used by learners. When learners are given lists of words to memorize, those that put the words in stories show far better retention. How much better? They remembered from two to seven times as many words (Higbee 1977)! Imagine if you could get your students to remember twice as many vocabulary items, and that was just the worst case. Indeed, stories are powerful, but are we really taking full advantage of them in our classrooms? Many published materials use stories, but why not rely more on our learners’ and our own to enhance learning?

Before considering that, however, let us go back to a very old question: Where does the power of stories come from? Neuroscience might have found the answer. Neuroscientist Zak (2015) has been doing amazing research on cortisol and oxytocin release caused by animated stories. He found that touching stories cause the release of both, resulting in greater attention, more sympathy, and changes in attitudes. Because of oxytocin release, Zak’s (2015) subjects were more willing to give money to strangers after hearing a touching story. He found something else out, too. The information must be structured a particular way for these neurotransmitters to be released, a structure we all know: the arc of the rising action, climax, and falling action that stories are made of. Our brains are built to respond to information presented in a highly sensory, cause-and-effect format.

We retain information from the narrative format, where events occur one after the other, because that is how we are wired (Widrich, 2012).

A story, if broken down into the simplest form is cause and effect. And that is exactly how we think. We think in narratives all day long, no matter if it is about buying groceries, whether we think about work or our spouse at home. We make up [short] stories in our heads for every action and conversation. (p. 1)

We see the world in affordances. So we are always predicting the potential outcomes of ours and others’ actions. We predict that asking something politely will get a positive reply. We estimate that we can pass the slow person walking in front of us if we take a couple of big steps now. Our cause-and-effect way of processing every moment is not just a conscious act. It happens unconsciously, uncontrollably, even when we are asleep. Basically, our brains are prediction machines.

Another factor influencing retention is that our brains are also built to remember things that are important to us. Stories are important because they are encapsulated experience. As Wilson (2002) puts it, “The stories we tell ourselves and others are our survival manuals” (p. 10). They help decode the world, exploit our environment, and hone our social skills. Mar and Oatley (2008) reported in two studies that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them, and see the world from their perspectives. Fiction, Mar and Oatley (2008) note,

…is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life. (p. 42)

Part of our evolutionary success comes from the way we have made these manuals of encapsulated experience transferrable. Hasson from Princeton examined the brains of someone telling a story and someone listening and found something surprising. Their brains linked up (Widrich, 2012). When the teller “had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners’ brains” (p. 1).

So, how can we tap into the power of stories in class? Obviously, we already are. Most of the readers used in the extensive reading approach are stories, and I suspect that their narrative format is one of the reasons they are so effective, a reason that has been missed by the experts. Textbook and video materials also use narratives.

However, there are two powerful areas of using stories that still seem underdeveloped: stories told by teachers and learners. Let me offer a few suggestions.

As for learners sharing stories, an easy way to start is to have them fold a piece of paper into four quadrants, label each quadrant with a key word, such as happy, sad, funny, and scary, and then drawing a picture of a personal experience for each. In pairs or groups, they relate these experiences. A slightly more complex way of having learners share stories is to have them make digitales, a method developed by Rex Tanimoto at Osaka Gakuin University. Learners write PowerPoint stories with one picture and one or two sentences per slide and then share them, thereby practicing discourse, speaking, and listening skills while having fun. Younger learners in particular seem to be adept at coming up with amazing stories.

An important point in these two methods is that they use pictures to support the stories. With lower level students, whose pronunciation and expressive abilities might be weak, the pictures are often just the scaffolding needed to make their stories comprehensible.

Whenever possible, I have students share personal stories in writing assignments too, even when teaching expository writing. For example, I ask students to write about an event that has changed their life. For me, it is a way to teach the cause-and-effect organizational mode—one paragraph each on a) what you were like before the event, b) the event, and c) what you were like after—but for the learners, it as a way to share profound personal experiences, often with tears.

Telling a story yourself is a great way to end a class. Whereas textbooks surround stories with vocabulary exercises and comprehension questions, these techniques are not really necessary or even helpful for live storytelling. These kinds of support too often derail a more important naturalistic focus on meaning. The most support I add is to stop a couple of times to summarize in learners’ L1 in an EFL environment or, simpler, slower English in an ESL one, to help the listeners keep on track. They might also discuss the meaning of the story after. As for the kind of stories to tell, I suggest that you keep them short—1 to 5 minutes—and use stories with a moral message that fits their stage of development. For example, with college students, I avoid fairy tales and folk talks—whose moral messages are things like “obey your parents,” or “the forest is dangerous”—and use true stories about conflict, compassion, resilience, and love: stories that help decode the complexities of life.

Sometimes, I tell my own stories, but I generally prefer telling the moving stories I have found online or in books. If you find it hard to tell a story in front of a group of people, even students, then keep three things in mind:

1. There is no such thing as a natural storyteller. Everyone who is good at it got there through practice.

2. Reduce the processing load by using simple utterances, avoiding digressions, and dramatizing the story with gestures and dialog as much as possible.

3. Tell the story outside of class a few times first. Storytellers agree that it is not until about the fifth time that they really master the pauses, voice changes, and word choice.

So let’s take advantage of this oldest, but still state-of-the-art, tool of teaching.

References

Graesser, A. C., Hoffman, N. L., & Clark, L. F. (1980). Structural components of reading time. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(2), 135–151.

Higbee, K. L. (1977). Your memory: How it works and how to improve it. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall

Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on psychological science, 3(3), 173–192.

Widrich, L. (2012, November 29). The science of storytelling: What listening to a story does to our brains [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://blog.bufferapp.com/science-of-storytelling-why-telling-a-story-is-the-most-powerful-way-to-activate-our-brains

Wilson, E. O. (2002). The power of story. American Educator, 26(1), 8–11.

Zak, P. J. (2015). Why inspiring stories make us react: The neuroscience of narrative.Cerebrum, 2. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445577/

Popular writer and speaker Curtis Kelly is a professor at Kansai University in Japan. He is the founder and coordinator of the Mind, Brain, and Education SIG of the Japan Association for Language Teaching.