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THE SCIENCE OF STORYTELLING: WHAT LISTENING TO A STORY DOES TO OUR BRAINS [Widrich, L. (2012).]

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THE SCIENCE OF STORYTELLING: WHAT LISTENING TO A STORY DOES TO OUR BRAINS [Widrich, L. (2012).]

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Main ideas:

When we are being told a story, though, things change dramatically, according to researchers in Spain. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.

When we tell stories to others that have helped us shape our thinking and way of life, we can have the same effect on them too.

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. In fact, Jeremy Hsu found:
“Personal stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversations.”

Now, whenever we hear a story, we want to relate it to one of our existing experiences. Whilst we are busy searching for a similar experience in our brains, we activate a part called insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, disgust or else.

According to Uri Hasson from Princeton, a story is the only way to activate parts in the brain so that a listener turns the story into their own idea and experience.

Our brain learn to ignore certain overused words and phrases that used to make stories awesome.

Storytelling is one of the most powerful techniques we have as humans to communicate and motivate.

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We can activate our brains better if we listen to stories. We are wired that way. A story, if broken down into the simplest form is a connection of cause and effect. And that is exactly how we think.

Everything in our brain is looking for the cause and effect relationship of something we’ve previously experienced.

When we think of stories, it is often easy to convince ourselves that they have to be complex and detailed to be interesting. The truth is however, that the simpler a story, the more likely it will stick.

Using simple language as well as a low complexity is the best way to activate the brain regions that make us truly relate to the situation and happenings in the story. This is a similar reason to why multitasking is so hard for us.

Try to reduce the number adjectives or complicated nouns in a presentation or article and exchange them with more simple, yet heartfelt language.

Scientists, in the midst of researching the topic of storytelling, have also discovered, that certain words and phrases have lost all storytelling power.

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LANGUAGE STRATEGY FOR DAY CARE CENTRES [Lillemor, Gammelgard. (2008). Helsinki: Yliopistopaino]

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LANGUAGE STRATEGY FOR DAY CARE CENTRES [Lillemor, Gammelgard. (2008). Helsinki: Yliopistopaino]

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Main ideas:

The children must play and do their own thing, but the adults or teachers can help them with their language.

To develop story-telling for children is important for their linguistic development and growth as a whole.

Children, who are not used to tell stories, can practice performing various tasks. For example, it is good to ask them about them own experiences, drawings, games, photographs, stories, fantasies, handcrafts, etc. Also it is good to ask about child‘s future plans, what they know and think.

Nowadays day care centers have very small budgets, so it is the reason why sometimes it is hard to achieve results which you want because all activities need materials.

It is very important that children could see more things and try more various activities because they become familiar with words for toys, games, mealtimes, routines and clothes.

Books with pictures is good when you have to present story for all children, it helps to keep their attention.

Books without pictures is good in small groups when you can stop and discuss things, answer questions.

Reading with expression and feeling can help children concentrate on the story and at the same time they receive a good linguistic example and learn rich language.

If children hear only stories at naptime, they can start to think books as some kind of sleeping pill.

One more important thing is that teachers have to insert observations of their play, interviews with the children and the children‘s own stories in their portfolios.

Parents should have opportunity to visit children day care center before they start going there because it has more time for discussion, to analyse the center‘s daily schedules and routines.

Important thing is that parents would spend time with children at home. They are valuable linguistic models for children and it is good opportunity to talk with them about daily routine, listening children‘s stories.

Parents have to be courage and start to read aloud to their children as soon as they start in the infant section.

Some experts recommend 15 minutes of reading aloud per day.

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It is important to speak in whole sentences. We should use rich and varied language, and we should avoid simplifications of the language after that we are sure that someone misunderstood anything.

It is important for children to listen to adults speak to each other, they need to her the language. We should avoid talking overs children's heads- it should go straight to kid not across the room.

Children need to hear adults express themselves in conversations and accounts, rather than just through instructions, prompts and prohibitions.

If someone wants to achieve good results, has to become used to listening, observing children in all situations and activities and writing down.

When children play freely, it is the best opportunity to observe and document.

Each day care center should have various corners that children could learn better new things and could feel comfortable.

Teachers have to let the children themselves present their favorite books.

That activities look more interesting for children, various kinds of language games and games that stimulate a linguistic awareness can be included as a natural part.

Various rhymes like poems and nursery can be used in routine situations, for example, when dressing children, in the bathroom queue, before and after naptime, at mealtimes, outdoors, etc.

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ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE IN PRESCHOOL PROGRAMS [Genesee, F. (1994). Educating Second Language Children. Cambridge: CUP]

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ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE IN PRESCHOOL PROGRAMS [Genesee, F. (1994). Educating Second Language Children. Cambridge: CUP]

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Main ideas:

Children from families whose home language is not English represent both a challenge and an opportunity for preschool educators.

The challenge is to develop preschool programs that can provide appropriate cognitive and linguistic enrichment for these children.

Preschool educators should be prepared to encourage parents to maintain the home language, so their children can develop world knowledge, vocabulary, and discourse strategies in their first language at home while developing expertise in the new language at school.

The child must realize that an entirely new language is required with a new vocabulary, a new set of rules for grammar and morphology, and a new set of social conventions.

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Successful schooling in a second language requires that programmatic adjustments be made in the educational setting.

The opportunity is to give children an early start in the process of learning a second language before they enter school.

Children of 3-5 age already have developed an extensive vocabulary, they can use all of the basic grammatical structures, and they have begun to learn when, where, and with whom it is appropriate to use certain language forms.

Children need a period of time when the child continues to use the home language even in second language situations. Most children then enter a nonverbal period, following this period, children begin to use telegraphic and formulaic phrases in the new language. After that children begin to develop productive use of the second language.

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Placa del Mesón del Champiñón en Madrid. Gorka Lejarcegi

"Pero en el instante mismo en que el trago mezclado con migas del bollo tocó mi paladar, me estremecí, atento a algo extraordinario que dentro de mí se producía". Marcel Proust nos hace revivir esa sensación cálida y placentera de comer un bollo mojado en una bebida caliente. Proust nos evoca sensaciones y pensamientos en los que todos nos reconocemos. No empleó las palabras que he utilizado, ya que escribió en francés, pero lo importante es que la lengua permitió la descripción y transmisión de un instante muy íntimo. Y esa capacidad, la lengua, es única y característica de los seres humanos.

Aunque en el mundo hay muchas lenguas, en el fondo no son más que variedades de la lengua humana. Por muy distintos que nos parezcan el japonés y el árabe, las redes neuronales que subyacen y posibilitan su aprendizaje y uso son extraordinariamente similares, por no decir las mismas. No hay lenguas más simples o más complejas, ni más fáciles o más difíciles; todas ellas son igualmente complicadas de aprender, ya que, no lo olvidemos, son la consecuencia de poseer un cerebro humano.

Al nacer podemos aprender con la misma facilidad, o dificultad, las distintas lenguas del mundo. El hecho de nacer con la piel de un color o de otro no influye en absoluto en las capacidades que un bebé tiene para aprender cualquier idioma. A veces se dice que el alemán "es una lengua difícil" porque a un no nativo le cuesta mucho aprenderla... de adulto. Pero para los bebés que nacen en el seno de familias en las que se habla el alemán, su aprendizaje es igual de trabajoso que para los que crecen en familias en las que se habla gallego o chino.

Los primeros pasos en el aprendizaje del lenguaje son muy similares. Todos los bebés, durante los primeros seis meses de vida, son capaces de percibir diferencias entre sonidos de las lenguas a los que no han estado expuestos nunca y que sus padres no pueden percibir, ni mucho menos producir. Por ejemplo, los bebés que nacen en familias en las que solo se habla japonés no tienen ninguna dificultad en percibir que las palabras "cara" y "cala" suenan diferente, aunque sus padres sean incapaces de pronunciarlas de manera distinta.

Entre los 6 y los 12 meses de vida, todos los bebés van a ir perdiendo esta capacidad de percibir sonidos que no son importantes para su lengua y van a empezar a percibir cada vez mejor los sonidos que sí que son relevantes en su lengua. También hacia los 6 meses de vida, todos los bebés ya van a ser capaces de reconocer sus primeras palabras, estén aprendiendo zulú, quechua o portugués.

Muchos padres se preocupan por si sus hijos no están aprendiendo al ritmo esperado, esta preocupación es incluso mayor en el caso de familias en las que se habla más de una lengua. Y esta preocupación parece razonable; de entrada, los bebés que crecen en entornos bilingües tienen, de promedio, la mitad de la exposición a cada una de las lenguas que los bebés que crecen en entornos monolingües. Pero, así y todo, aprenden al mismo tiempo, eso sí, adaptando de manera sutil algunos aspectos.

Por ejemplo, al nacer, los bebés miran de manera intensa a los ojos de sus cuidadores. Hacia los 4-6 meses, los bebés que crecen en entornos monolingües empiezan a mirar preferentemente a la boca de las personas con las que interactúan, y hacia el final del primer año de vida vuelven a prestar mucha más atención a los ojos que a la boca. Los bebés que crecen en entornos bilingües hacen exactamente lo mismo, solo que miran durante más meses a la boca (empiezan un poco antes y lo prolongan un poco más).

Los adultos miramos más a la boca de alguien que habla cuando nos cuesta entenderlo (porque hay mucho ruido o porque es alguien que habla en una lengua que no dominamos). Es pues probable que esta modulación de la atención de los bebés hacia la boca también refleje la necesidad de obtener el máximo de información posible sobre lo que están escuchando. Incrementando la atención a la zona de la boca en este periodo, los bebés expuestos a dos lenguas al mismo tiempo consiguen aprender el lenguaje al mismo ritmo que los que solo están expuestos a una. Esta homogeneidad en las primeras etapas del aprendizaje nos muestra hasta qué punto el cerebro humano está preparado para aprender "la lengua de los humanos", tenga la forma del sueco, el navajo o el coreano, y se aprenda solo una lengua o más de una a la vez.

El cerebro humano ha creado y está especializado en aprender y usar este lenguaje redundante e imperfecto. El cerebro funciona en forma de redes complejas que conectan distintas estructuras. Cuando escuchamos hablar a alguien, prácticamente todo el cerebro se pone en marcha, como si se tratara de un baile con millones de bailarines. Al escuchar la frase "el trago mezclado con migas del bollo tocó mi paladar", millones de neuronas en nuestro hemisferio izquierdo van a activarse de forma organizada y van a descodificar la señal acústica, van a reconocer las palabras, van a determinar qué es el sujeto y qué es el verbo en la oración.

Al mismo tiempo, también van a verse implicadas millones de neuronas en otras partes del cerebro que tienen que ver con el sentido del olfato, del gusto y también del tacto. Todas estas redes de neuronas se cruzan y generan un patrón único que encierra el significado de la frase. Las personas bilingües organizan esas neuronas que descodifican la señal del habla y encuentran sujetos y verbos de dos maneras diferentes. Las neuronas son mayoritariamente las mismas, aunque podríamos decir que saben bailar dos melodías. También se cruzarán con esas otras neuronas que codifican las sensaciones y las emociones y, al hacerlo, crearán vínculos entre cada lengua y cada vivencia.

Para la persona bilingüe, la relación entre cada una de sus lenguas y sus experiencias personales es también única. Los bailes sincronizados de las neuronas encierran nuestros recuerdos de todas las magdalenas que nos hemos comido a lo largo de nuestra vida, de todas las canciones que hemos cantado y de todos los sonidos que constituyen nuestras lenguas.

Núria Sebastián Gallés es catedrática de la Universidad Pompeu Fabra, experta en desarrollo neurocognitivo y bilingüismo.

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"Pero en el instante mismo en que el trago mezclado con migas del bollo tocó mi paladar, me estremecí, atento a algo extraordinario que dentro de mí se producía". Marcel Proust nos hace revivir esa sensación cálida y placentera de comer un bollo mojado en una bebida caliente.

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MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water."

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PATRICIA KUHL: THE LINGUISTIC GENIUS OF BABIES

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PATRICIA KUHL: THE LINGUISTIC GENIUS OF BABIES

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Babies and children are geniuses (until 7 age), because to learn a new language is easier for younger people.

Half-aged children are able to understand what is going on around them (all languages, sounds).

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Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies

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Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

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[Video in Basque language]

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LEARNING A FIRST LANGUAGE [Lightbown, P. & Spada, N. (2006). How Languages are Learned. Oxford: OUP.]

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LEARNING A FIRST LANGUAGE [Lightbown, P. & Spada, N. (2006). How Languages are Learned. Oxford: OUP.]

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Demographic research shows that minority languages are usually lost in the second generation after immigration. Children who have the opportunity to learn multiple languages from early childhood and to maintain them throughout their lives are fortunate indeed, and families that can offer this opportunity to their children should be encouraged to do so.

The developmental sequences seem to be determined more by the gradual mastery of the linguistic elements for expressing ideas which have been present in children's cognitive understanding for a long time.

Children are biologically programmed for language and that language develops in the child in just the same way that other biological functions develop.

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It is generally accepted that by age four, children have mastered the basic structures of the language which have been spoken to them in these early years.

The interactionists' position is that language develops as a result of the complex interplay between the uniquely human characteristics of the child and the environment in which the child develops. Interactionists attribute considerably more importance to the environment than the innatists do.

Learning more than one language in early childhood slows down the child‘s linguistic or cognitive development.

By the age of three and a half or four years most children can ask a questions, give commands, report real events, and create stories about imaginary ones – complete with correct grammatical morphemes.

Children who hear more than one language virtually from birth are sometimes referred to as simultaneous bilinguals.

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IMPORTANCE OF STORYTELLING FOR CHILDREN [Longfellow, P. (2017).]

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IMPORTANCE OF STORYTELLING FOR CHILDREN [Longfellow, P. (2017).]

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Storytelling teaches children about the world, provides real-world social interaction, and develops both a knowledge and love for stories themselves.

Through stories, children see a dramatic representation of problems, how characters choose to solve them and the positive and negative consequences of those choices. They meet characters from their own culture and others, and become familiar with a range of customs, personalities and points of view.

Storytelling provides children with the opportunity to practice social skills such as listening, making eye contact and taking turns.

Storytelling acts as fuel for the fire of literacy in a child's development.

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As children listen to stories, they become familiar with the art and practice of storytelling itself, internalize the rhythms and tones of a storyteller's words and know what makes stories interesting, exciting, funny and sad.

Regularly seeing public speaking in action, children become more comfortable with oral communication in general, helping them to tell their own stories in an effective way.

Storytelling surreptitiously teaches children the elements of a story, helping them devise their own narrative beginnings, middles and ends.

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LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: THE EARLY YEARS [Pakenham, K. T. (2004). Making Connections: a strategic approach to academic reading. Cambridge: CUP.]

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LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: THE EARLY YEARS [Pakenham, K. T. (2004). Making Connections: a strategic approach to academic reading. Cambridge: CUP.]

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Language acquisition takes place regardless of weather the caregivers are educated, prosperous citizens of a so-called advanced society or are uneducated, even illiterate, impoverished members of a developing country.

A comprehensive treatment of child language acquisition would involve looking at data on the development of a child's phonology, grammar, and vocabulary.

Children's errors are further evidence of the rule-governed and creative nature of their utterances.

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The grammar of children's English becomes evident when they are able to produce utterances consisting of two words.

When we consider what children do not say, we notice that children use correct word order.

Children's mistakes show that children construct grammatical rules for themselves without direct teaching.

Overgeneralization - the process of extending the application of a rule to items that are excluded from it in the languagenorm, as when a child uses the regular past tense verb ending -ed offorms like I walked to produce forms like *I goed or *I rided.