Storytelling in a Meaning-and-Fluency Task in the Second Language Classroom

In this chapter we examine storytelling sequences elicited from L2 students in a meaning-and-fluency classroom activity. The data consist of video recordings of an adult L2 English class in the UK. The teacher is a first language (L1) English speaker, and there are three students (one Spanish L1, two Arabic L1). Our observations relate to (1) the elicitation of the story, (2) its (co-)telling and (3) its receipt. We note first that these stories are always produced as a response to a question prompt from an L2 teaching resource book. Second, we explore how this launch – and the overarching pedagogic activity – can affect the internal construction of the story, particularly in the form of co-construction by the teacher. Third, we note that when receipting the story, the L2 teacher tends to focus on alignment and understanding checks (e.g., in the form of assessments and/or continuers) rather than affiliation with the teller as is often the case in everyday conversation. We thus show that while meaning-and-fluency tasks, such as the one analyzed here, may aim to encourage conversational forms of interaction between participants, institutional – specifically pedagogical – features of interaction may still be evident.