Language Experience
The Experience Story
The following definition of “experience story” will seem too simple to be true: A student learning to read dictates a story to a tutor or teacher, who writes it down. The tutor and the student have each other’s full attention. The student draws upon personal experience, opinions, memories, or imagination to tell the tutor what he wants written down. Together they produce a written piece. There is more to it, but that’s the basic description.
Any written material is valuable raw material in teaching, but this is writing with heart. Because of its origin it cannot be mistaken for flat, dry, disconnected strings of words. It is alive! It is charged with personality. You, as tutor or teacher, have many options. You will certainly guide your student in reading the story. You can use the words in the story to reinforce letter recognition, sight words, phonics, handwriting, punctuation and sentence structure. Whatever is done with the story occurs on a unique plane of education.
The experience story also provides the student strong motivation for writing. If you consider what it would be like not to be able to write a letter to a friend, or keep a diary or journal, or write a letter of consumer complaint or a letter to the newspaper, or just occasionally vent you feelings on paper-if you can imagine not having a writing voice, then you can understand that the experience story is a kind of liberation for an adult student learning to read. It quickly opens up the possibilities to express themselves orally. I also permits you, the tutor, to appreciate the inner life of the student and demonstrate your respect for it in a quiet concrete way.
Many, many adult students are reluctant or unable to write independently. The experience story is a springboard t written self-expression. The student can temporarily forget his embarrassment and hesitations about spelling, handwriting, and grammar. He can lean on his tutor’s or teacher’s skills for a while, and still take away from the lesson written evidence of his own creativity and thought.
An experience story can be funny, or tragic, or poignantly reflective. It can be brief or very long, a joke or poem. It is always a valuable enrichment to a reading lesson.
Getting Your Student’s Story
Experience stories are easy to incorporate into a reading lesson. The steps below should help you get started. Steps 4-6 will also be of use when you reach the “story starters” in each writing section of this book.
1. Set aside 15 or 20 minutes at the end of the tutoring session. Or take an “experience story bread” when your student is especially frustrated or unable to concentrate on other work. Another appropriate time would be that start of a lesson if your student appears upset or distracted.
2. If this is the first time you and your student have done an experience story, tell her she will be doing something new that will help her to reach her goal of improving her reading and writing. Explain that you will be her secretary for a while, writing down just Explain that you will be her secretary for a while, writing down just what she says, as she tells about something important to her. Explain that after she has finished telling you what to write, you will use what’s o the paper for a reading lesson.
3. “Is there something you have in mind to write about?” Often, especially in the case of the upset or frustrated student, this is enough to get the story started. After the two of you have been doing experience stories for a while, you’ll probably find that ideas will come to both of you quite easily.
4. Write down what your student says, word for word, without changing grammar. Write in clear manuscript (print), on lined paper, skipping a space between each line. If you’re having trouble keeping up, ask your student to slow down: “I can’t write as quickly as you talk.” She will learn to adjust to your pace.
5. If your student is hesitant, or needs some prompting, ask open-ended questions about the topic, which will help her to continue, as you would in a conversation.
6. End the story when your student is satisfied, or consider it one part of a to-be-continued long piece to pick up again in the next lesson (see the story “Where I’ve Been” for an example). Ask your student to provide a title.
Now you are ready to use the experience story to practice a variety of reading skills, as outlined in “skill Practice” on pages 6 and 7.
Skill Practice
The first step below is an essential follow-up to each experience story. According to your student’s needs and the time available, use any or all of the other suggestions.
Reading. If your student is a beginning reader, or lacks confidence in his reading ability, read the entire story to him. Follow along below the words with your finger as you read at a normal pace. Next, ask the student to read the story back to you. If that’s too big a chunk, read it again, a sentence at a time, instructing him to read each sentence after you do. Keep your guiding finger running smoothly below the words. Then, if you judge him to be ready, ask him to read the complete story. Supply words he gets stuck on, but make a mental note of them. Don’t be disturbed if you think he is “reading” from memory this is a legitimate stage in learning to read.
If the student is reading with some confidence, ask him to read the story aloud without preparation. Again, supply frustrating words while mentally noting them. Remember that most texts used to teach reading are written with a controlled vocabulary carefully geared to learned phonics skills; experience stories are dictated without regard for reading level.
Word bank. Ask the student to look through his story and select a few words which he would like to learn to spell and read- no matter how difficult. List them under the story, and add, if they weren’t suggested, a few of the words he got stuck on while reading aloud. Limit the word bank to six or less per story. Help the student to break the words down, recognize familiar letter combinations, and take note of the sounds he hasn’t yet studied. Word banks are saved for a permanent reference to be used in future writing, and to practice reading aloud. The great value of the word bank is that the student has chosen many of the words. The chosen words are often ones he frequently uses in speech and would like to include in his reading/writing vocabulary.
Reading skills. Experience stories can be used for teaching many reading skills. In fact, some literacy programs use them as the basic student text for teaching phonics. In order of increasing difficulty, here are a few examples of practice exercises using the student story.
1. Select words which: - begin with “ch,” “sh,” “th”/ end with “ch,” “sh”, - contain short vowels sounds being studied; - begin wit blends; - contain long vowels; - contain vowel combinations.
2. Have the student locate sight words or words you have recently thought.
3. Omit punctuation and have the student fill it in.
These are only a few examples. Remember that an experience story is a powerful teaching tool just by virtue of the student having been its creator. Any connections you can draw between your routine lessons and the story demonstrate to the student “realness” of the skills he is learning.
Handwriting. Most adult students need handwriting practice, especially those who have just learned either cursive or script. Copying their stories gives them practice in writing something of great interest to them.
Writing. As you read this story with your student, set the stage for independent writing by occasionally pausing at awkward or confusing points to ask, “How can you say this more clearly?” or “This doesn’t say what I think you mean- how would you change it?” Then edit the piece as the student tells you to. Many students will themselves notice errors or repetitions and direct you to change them. The point here is not to rewrite the story according to your idea of how it should be, but to create an awareness in the student of the flexibility of written expression and of his ability to manipulate it to serve his purposes. “When we speak, we can’t change what’s been said; when we write, we can.”
Your student may even want to write his own stories instead of dictating them, especially after you have done some together. Encourage him to keep part of a notebook as a journal of his own writing. He can read you the stories if he likes, but needn’t show them to anyone. Grammar and spelling mistakeswon’t matter. Getting used to expressing his thoughts in written form will help him in later, more formal writing.
Taken from Getting Started with Experience Stories by Joan Barasovska.
The following definition of “experience story” will seem too simple to be true: A student learning to read dictates a story to a tutor or teacher, who writes it down. The tutor and the student have each other’s full attention. The student draws upon personal experience, opinions, memories, or imagination to tell the tutor what he wants written down. Together they produce a written piece. There is more to it, but that’s the basic description.
Any written material is valuable raw material in teaching, but this is writing with heart. Because of its origin it cannot be mistaken for flat, dry, disconnected strings of words. It is alive! It is charged with personality. You, as tutor or teacher, have many options. You will certainly guide your student in reading the story. You can use the words in the story to reinforce letter recognition, sight words, phonics, handwriting, punctuation and sentence structure. Whatever is done with the story occurs on a unique plane of education.
The experience story also provides the student strong motivation for writing. If you consider what it would be like not to be able to write a letter to a friend, or keep a diary or journal, or write a letter of consumer complaint or a letter to the newspaper, or just occasionally vent you feelings on paper-if you can imagine not having a writing voice, then you can understand that the experience story is a kind of liberation for an adult student learning to read. It quickly opens up the possibilities to express themselves orally. I also permits you, the tutor, to appreciate the inner life of the student and demonstrate your respect for it in a quiet concrete way.
Many, many adult students are reluctant or unable to write independently. The experience story is a springboard t written self-expression. The student can temporarily forget his embarrassment and hesitations about spelling, handwriting, and grammar. He can lean on his tutor’s or teacher’s skills for a while, and still take away from the lesson written evidence of his own creativity and thought.
An experience story can be funny, or tragic, or poignantly reflective. It can be brief or very long, a joke or poem. It is always a valuable enrichment to a reading lesson.
Getting Your Student’s Story
Experience stories are easy to incorporate into a reading lesson. The steps below should help you get started. Steps 4-6 will also be of use when you reach the “story starters” in each writing section of this book.
1. Set aside 15 or 20 minutes at the end of the tutoring session. Or take an “experience story bread” when your student is especially frustrated or unable to concentrate on other work. Another appropriate time would be that start of a lesson if your student appears upset or distracted.
2. If this is the first time you and your student have done an experience story, tell her she will be doing something new that will help her to reach her goal of improving her reading and writing. Explain that you will be her secretary for a while, writing down just Explain that you will be her secretary for a while, writing down just what she says, as she tells about something important to her. Explain that after she has finished telling you what to write, you will use what’s o the paper for a reading lesson.
3. “Is there something you have in mind to write about?” Often, especially in the case of the upset or frustrated student, this is enough to get the story started. After the two of you have been doing experience stories for a while, you’ll probably find that ideas will come to both of you quite easily.
4. Write down what your student says, word for word, without changing grammar. Write in clear manuscript (print), on lined paper, skipping a space between each line. If you’re having trouble keeping up, ask your student to slow down: “I can’t write as quickly as you talk.” She will learn to adjust to your pace.
5. If your student is hesitant, or needs some prompting, ask open-ended questions about the topic, which will help her to continue, as you would in a conversation.
6. End the story when your student is satisfied, or consider it one part of a to-be-continued long piece to pick up again in the next lesson (see the story “Where I’ve Been” for an example). Ask your student to provide a title.
Now you are ready to use the experience story to practice a variety of reading skills, as outlined in “skill Practice” on pages 6 and 7.
Skill Practice
The first step below is an essential follow-up to each experience story. According to your student’s needs and the time available, use any or all of the other suggestions.
Reading. If your student is a beginning reader, or lacks confidence in his reading ability, read the entire story to him. Follow along below the words with your finger as you read at a normal pace. Next, ask the student to read the story back to you. If that’s too big a chunk, read it again, a sentence at a time, instructing him to read each sentence after you do. Keep your guiding finger running smoothly below the words. Then, if you judge him to be ready, ask him to read the complete story. Supply words he gets stuck on, but make a mental note of them. Don’t be disturbed if you think he is “reading” from memory this is a legitimate stage in learning to read.
If the student is reading with some confidence, ask him to read the story aloud without preparation. Again, supply frustrating words while mentally noting them. Remember that most texts used to teach reading are written with a controlled vocabulary carefully geared to learned phonics skills; experience stories are dictated without regard for reading level.
Word bank. Ask the student to look through his story and select a few words which he would like to learn to spell and read- no matter how difficult. List them under the story, and add, if they weren’t suggested, a few of the words he got stuck on while reading aloud. Limit the word bank to six or less per story. Help the student to break the words down, recognize familiar letter combinations, and take note of the sounds he hasn’t yet studied. Word banks are saved for a permanent reference to be used in future writing, and to practice reading aloud. The great value of the word bank is that the student has chosen many of the words. The chosen words are often ones he frequently uses in speech and would like to include in his reading/writing vocabulary.
Reading skills. Experience stories can be used for teaching many reading skills. In fact, some literacy programs use them as the basic student text for teaching phonics. In order of increasing difficulty, here are a few examples of practice exercises using the student story.
1. Select words which: - begin with “ch,” “sh,” “th”/ end with “ch,” “sh”, - contain short vowels sounds being studied; - begin wit blends; - contain long vowels; - contain vowel combinations.
2. Have the student locate sight words or words you have recently thought.
3. Omit punctuation and have the student fill it in.
These are only a few examples. Remember that an experience story is a powerful teaching tool just by virtue of the student having been its creator. Any connections you can draw between your routine lessons and the story demonstrate to the student “realness” of the skills he is learning.
Handwriting. Most adult students need handwriting practice, especially those who have just learned either cursive or script. Copying their stories gives them practice in writing something of great interest to them.
Writing. As you read this story with your student, set the stage for independent writing by occasionally pausing at awkward or confusing points to ask, “How can you say this more clearly?” or “This doesn’t say what I think you mean- how would you change it?” Then edit the piece as the student tells you to. Many students will themselves notice errors or repetitions and direct you to change them. The point here is not to rewrite the story according to your idea of how it should be, but to create an awareness in the student of the flexibility of written expression and of his ability to manipulate it to serve his purposes. “When we speak, we can’t change what’s been said; when we write, we can.”
Your student may even want to write his own stories instead of dictating them, especially after you have done some together. Encourage him to keep part of a notebook as a journal of his own writing. He can read you the stories if he likes, but needn’t show them to anyone. Grammar and spelling mistakeswon’t matter. Getting used to expressing his thoughts in written form will help him in later, more formal writing.
Taken from Getting Started with Experience Stories by Joan Barasovska.