Grammar Stories: a proposal for the storification of grammar rules

This thesis proposes a procedure to transform abstract concepts into meaningful stories and evaluates its application to grammar rules in two contexts of English learnt as foreign language by Italians: as online resources available to adult independent learners, and as learning activity carried out in school. In the first case, users are passive receivers of the content produced with the procedure; in the second case, learners actively apply it while working on grammar rules. In both situations, the present research study aims to evaluate if the delivery of abstract information in story-form facilitates its understanding and memorization. This thesis, however, is also a journey which lasted three years. It started in November 2013, with the admission into the Digital Humanities PhD program of the University of Genoa. The research project I1 proposed was aimed at developing a playful and narrative digital tool to help people learn English. My previous studies and my experiences as a teacher had convinced me of the value of games and stories for learning: the combination of the two looked like the Holy Grail of teaching to me. While deepening the theoretical background necessary to realize my idea, I ended up refining my initial plan, abandoning the idea of the video-game in favour of a simpler tool apt to help Italian adult independent learners of English as a foreign language. This certainly was influenced not only by the literature, but also, and especially, by observing many of my friends struggling with speaking correct English, a situation which is shared with too many Italians. I therefore decided I needed more information on this issue. As suggested by Design Thinking, the first thing to do was framing the problem, understanding its peculiarities, and identifying the needs of my prospective users. I was surprised to note that almost all of them, even the most skilled ones or those who had been living abroad, were prone to very basic mistakes. Most of them confessed to talk and write English as if they were “playing by ear”. The problem with such behaviour is that their native language, Italian, was interfering with the foreign language and leading them to use incorrect forms. They said they remembered grammar rules vaguely and would not rely too much on them. They also did not want to spend time studying on books to learn things they felt they “knew already”: they seemed to be irritated by lengthy and abstract explanations. In order to help them – and the many Italian learners in a similar situation - I decided to focus on one specific, concrete problem: I decided to work on common mistakes of Italian speakers of English and concentrated on a book that highlighted them (Swan, Smith, 2001). As a pedagogical approach, I decided to focus on narrative learning. My previous research in storytelling and my experiences with it in real life had convinced me of the communication power of stories. Good storytelling works with any age, any background, any topic. In fact, it has been used for teaching since the dawn of time, as I had discovered during the year I spent in Australia teaching Italian as a Foreign Language at high-school level. It was while visiting Uluru, the most sacred of the Aboriginal mountains, that I found that its lower part is completely covered by drawings that were used by the elders to tell stories to the kids and educate them about Life. I was thrilled by the idea of exploring new digital forms of storytelling that would perpetuate its role in learning. For the issue I wanted to address, however, a level of difficulty was introduced by the fact that grammar rules are abstract concepts, and therefore they cannot be straightforwardly expressed in story form. Moreover, I knew it was not enough to produce some videos presenting a story, but rather to find a “formula” apt to transform grammar rules, and possibly any other abstract concept, into stories. The narrativization of abstract concepts has been discussed for quite some time by academics of different backgrounds, but a replicable procedure that could work in a variety of cases was still missing. It took several months and many readings to find a way to standardize the process. By February 2016 I had created the first prototype of Grammar Story, working on a mistake that is very common among Italians: the missing -s at the end of Present Tense verbs at the third singular person. The story was titled “Speed Dating”. By the end of the year, the first version of what I called “storification procedure” was ready. Between February and March, I wrote, scripted, produced, edited five other Grammar Stories, further refining the procedure during the process. My intention was to define a procedure people could use to create effective learning material (education professionals, designers of multimedia learning material and e-learning platforms, publishing houses, …), but in the meanwhile I realised there were other people who could benefit from the storification procedure: students and teachers. The procedure could be used by teachers to create material for their students, but also as class activity to be carried out with and by the students, in which they would be guided to produce their own stories. This possibility was worth being explored as well. As soon as my Grammar Stories were ready, I created a website to experiment them with independent adult learners, and at the same time I started sending a proposal for a Grammar Stories workshop to Dottoranda: Serena Zampolli 8 schools. Thanks to a keen English teacher, I was able to do a first exploratory trial in June 2017. The experience helped me understand what needed to be adjusted, and in the Fall I repeated the experiment in three schools. This thesis is the detailed report of this learning journey. Chapter 1 provides the Theoretical Framework for this study; it constitutes the foundation of my proposal and it is the result of extensive readings on storytelling and multimedia technology in learning context. Chapter 2 describes the storification procedure and its development. Chapter 3 illustrates the methodology for the experimentation and frames it in the context of language learning theory. Chapter 4 reports Experiment A, carried out with adult independent learners who were using the 6 Grammar stories produced. Chapter 5 describes the first field trial realised in schools on June 2017, while Chapter 6 reports on the multiple trials run in Fall 2017; all together they constitute Experiment B. Lastly, Chapter 7 draws some conclusion from this experience. I decided to devote this introduction to talking about the journey of this study for two reasons: the first is that I believe in storytelling as a most powerful communication tool, and it would be contradictory not to present it in form of story; the second is that these three years were not an easy journey. It took time to develop each part of this project, it was necessary to repeatedly explore, compare, analyse and check, but it surely was a journey where much was learnt. Before starting, some terminological clarifications are needed. In this work, “storytelling” is intended as the telling of stories which have a beginning, a development, and an end. “Narrate” is the action of delivering information in the form of a story or anyway in narrative form. It was decided to call the procedure a “storification procedure” because it aims to create stories with a beginning, a development (often including a conflict) and an end. Most of the studies on storytelling start with a definition of what is intended with "story". Instead of providing a rigid definition, I decided to identify some structural features of stories, and they are described in Section 1.2