Using Stories To Learn English

Hello, welcome to the Effortless English Show. I'm A.J. Hogue. Go to EffortlessEnglishClub.com to join one of our email courses or paid courses. Welcome to the Effortless English show.

Today's guest is Blaine Ray, the developer of TPRS, System of Teaching, teaching language through storytelling. We'll talk to him more about the details of using stories to improve your English.

When I first used a story to teach English was in Japan and I was teaching a group of university students, about 50 students in the class. I was standing up in front of the class, and they had their usual bored looks on their faces.

They were bored and tired. And I thought, this time I'm going to do something different. I had been reading about using stories to teach English, and I had read Blaine's book.

So instead of doing my usual lecture, I started to tell a story. And I told this crazy story about a baby with a samurai sword and it was running around and fighting monsters and eating ice cream.

And as I told the story, I drew pictures on the blackboard. I drew a picture of a big baby with a sword. And as I was telling the story, I got really excited. I was running back and forth and doing all kinds of strange voices.

And I can remember at one point turning and looking back at the class. Now usually, when I looked at my class in Japan of university students, they looked like this.

I would be lecturing them in a normal class. Their heads would be kind of down. They would be writing notes. They all looked half dead, half asleep. But this time, as I was telling this crazy story, they were all looking at me with huge eyes.

They looked shocked. They looked surprised. They looked amused. They didn't know what was happening, really, or why I was doing this. But the main thing is, and the most important thing to me, they looked interested.

They were extremely interested in what was happening. Instead of being bored, all of their concentration, all of their focus was on me, and more importantly, on English, on what I was saying, on understanding the story.

Now, at that time, I was not using the actual techniques of TPRS, which Blaine may talk about, but just by telling a story instead of lecturing about grammar and vocabulary...

was enough to hold their interest. Every student in the class was focused, was listening, and was understanding. And that event is what really sold me, what told me that storytelling was a very powerful way to teach English, and for the students, a very powerful way for them to learn English.

Now, my first guest, Blaine Ray, developed TPRS, as a means of teaching language. He is a fantastic language teacher. I'm going to let him talk about his story and tell you how he used to teach language and how he teaches it now and what the TPRS method actually is.

So let's go to Blaine and let me just get him unmuted here. One second. Okay, Blaine, hello, can you hear me? Yeah, you bet. Okay, let me just make sure I've got you here.

Okay. One more time, hello? Yeah, I can hear you fine. Okay, great. Hey, how are you doing? Good. So could you first start by telling us when did you decide to become a teacher?

Oh, well, I coached a little baseball team when I was in high school when I was 16 and loved working with kids. So I decided then I was going to be a teacher.

Did you immediately start teaching language? Because you were a Spanish teacher, is that right? Yeah, right. I went on an LDS church mission, and I lived in Chile for two years when I was 19.

And it was after I got back, well, then I learned Spanish down there. And so I already knew Spanish. And so that's when I decided, after that, I decided to be a Spanish teacher.

I see. What was it like when you first started, your first year of teaching? Well, I had about five years. It was a very difficult start. And I didn't know how to teach.

And I felt like I really hadn't been trained how to teach. And so I tried different things, but nothing really worked. And the biggest problem was it didn't matter what I did or how I did it, students didn't stick. There was just no long-term memory.

And so it was a very frustrating experience. I went from in three different schools in four years. One school they didn't offer me a contract back. I went to another school and they told me at the third school there was only 31 kids in the whole Spanish program and the school of 900.

And the principal told me one day if you don't get more students in your class you're not going to teach here. So I was just struggling to even be successful with the teacher at all.

And nothing I did seemed to work. So what inspired you to change into this method? You know, what inspired that in the very beginning? What really inspired it was just to try to keep my job.

But at first, I'd heard just one sentence about this way of teaching with commands in college. And so the year was 1980, and I'd been teaching for five years. And I found a book written by James Asher called Learning Another Language Through Action.

And so I went in and started teaching with commands to my class. And just totally a radical different way of teaching from what I'd done before. And I just told them, stand up and sit down. And I just modeled the command.

And I just kept doing more and more of that. And boy, that really worked. I had a girl that had been in my class for one year and she went to Costa Rica for six months so after six months while she came back and by then I've been teaching with commands for three months and I told her I said Tammy you've got to see this new way of teaching and so she came into the class the first day and I turned the class over to the kids and they gave her

commands for a whole hour no English at all and at the end of the class I said what do you think about that she said that's the most amazing thing I've ever seen that those kids learn more Spanish in three months in your class than I learned in three months of living in Costa Rica so I really felt I found a way to teach language with command but after a while it broke down and there were there were

I call it a TPR wall, and really everybody ran into this to try TPR. You could only go so far with commands. And TPR broke down when you – it worked when you could model something and there was only one interpretation. But when you modeled – tried to model something or gesture something and you had multiple interpretations, then students didn't get a clear understanding.

It wasn't really comprehensible. It was an attempt at comprehensible, but it was confusing input, not comprehensible input. And so that's why the TPR part of it broke down.

And so how did you then develop the idea of stories? Where did that come from? So you were using actions. Uh-huh. It came actually three years later when I read another book by Steven Krashen, and he said language is learned by comprehensible input.

When I heard that, then I thought, oh, this is what I'm missing. And so then I took that idea of just teaching with comprehensible input and started dramatizing stories in the classroom. And then that worked better than anything I could see. And I could see even early on that my best students were leaving my class fluent in Spanish.

And when I say fluent, they still had hesitation and they made errors. But they had the one thing that I didn't have after a thousand hours of learning Spanish. They had confidence to say whatever they wanted.

And it was that confidence that is the key element of fluency. And that's what teaching with stories does better than anything that I've ever found. And how'd that make you feel as a teacher to see that big shift in your students, that confidence developing? It just changed my whole career.

I was trying to just keep my job as a teacher. And then we went from this school that we had 31 students in the whole foreign language program in this school.

And in six years, we had the highest percentage of foreign language enrollment in the state of Oregon for a school our size. They had to hire another full-time Spanish teacher, a French teacher, a Russian teacher, and a Japanese because of this new way of teaching, everybody wanted to take language.

Wow, that's fantastic. And what about now? Obviously, you're not teaching in schools anymore. So can you tell me how this grew to go from you teaching in a school to now where it's international?

Yeah. Yeah, well, it would have never happened except that James Asher, who was the inventor of TPR, the teaching with commands, then he published a book that I wrote, which was Look, I Can Talk. And it was just this idea of teaching stories based on TPR.

And so that's how it started out. Once that book was published, why then teachers wanted to know how to teach the book. And so that was in 1989. And after that, I just went out and started giving workshops and little by little got known.

And then about five years after that, 1995, then I just started my own business. And I just tell someone else that I started going out and then giving my own workshops.

summer workshops. So I've been doing summer workshops for every year for the last 19 years. After that, it just got more and more known, and then it just became more and more known internationally.

You've mentioned one of your students from the past that came back from Costa Rica. Do you have any examples of students that were in your class and then went off to use the language after being in your class? Is there one that you're particularly proud of?

Oh, boy, that's a major list of kids that have written back to me 5, 10, 15, and 20 years after my class. I just recently heard from a girl, and she told me, she said, she lives in Austin, Texas.

She said, I use my Spanish in my job about 30 hours a week. And she said, when people ask me where I learned Spanish, I tell them I learned it in high school. They can't believe it. They've never seen anyone that could speak Spanish that well from high school Spanish.

And then she said, I probably cursed those mini cuenzos that we had when I was in class. But she said, when I got out, I could see that I was fluent in Spanish. She said, now I use my Spanish in my job 30 hours a week. But I've heard from many kids and connected with them on Facebook and seen their Facebook pages where they say, I'm bilingual or I'm a bilingual kindergarten teacher.

And some of these kids, that happened 20 years ago. Wow. It's just been a miracle to see. And the main thing that they got out of my class was fluency.

They learned how to talk in class, and that's what's so different from other ways of teaching. Where they teach about grammar and grammar rules, that doesn't give kids that gift of fluency. But teaching with stories, and where they learn a story, they think about the story, not about the language.

That's the key that we found in learning language. The activity is so interesting. I love your story about teaching that story in Japan and the baby and the sword. It just made me laugh.

But that's how you learn language. You learn it with a baby and a sword. and Japan, and you don't even think about this story, and it just makes you laugh because it's so unusual. So who would think about a baby with a sword?

When you hear a story about that, you just think about the story, and the language process is an unconscious process. It's picking up a language. It's really how kids learn language. They don't know that.

It's absolutely what happened. That's amazing. You know, this method has transformed and had a huge effect on my teaching as well, and I imagine that you, because now you're really focused on teacher training, you probably see this with teachers too, that it not only makes these huge, wonderful changes for the students, but it transformed your career, it transformed mine. Do you see this as well with other teachers?

Yeah. It was just about a year and a half ago, I was contacted by a teacher in Natal, Brazil. And she just said, we need help. She said, we don't know how to teach fluency here.

And so I went down three times and visited their school and helped with teacher training. And every time the results of TPRS were miraculous. And she told me, she said, we're competing with students here because we have this, we have the biggest bilingual school in our city in northern Brazil.

And she said, if we don't have students, you know, then we don't have a job here. And she said, once we've started teaching with this, she said, the principal and everybody above us, they are amazed at the success. She said, they gave me my own office here and they bought me a smart board and they've done all these things to promote this.

And it was interesting, too. The very first time I was there, I taught a class of fifth graders. And when I went back, why, I could just see, then I could interview those kids and just see how much they learned just in a few months.

But she said our teachers here, they were just desperate before. And she said this so totally changed our lives. She told me one day, she said, I thank God every day.

for Blaine Ray and TPRS. That's fantastic. It's just been amazing to see what it's done for certain people. That's amazing. Well, I know you need to get going, so can you tell us

How can people learn more about what you're doing, get in touch with you if they want teacher training or one of your conferences, anything like that? What's the best way? Yeah, our website is BlaineRayTPRS.com.

BlaineRayTPRS.com. The number one thing, our number one book is called Fluency Through TPR Storytelling. That's available anywhere on Amazon or at our website or you can get that anywhere.

And then other things now, a lot of these classes, like I told you, I taught in China and some of these different places. I've taken them and put them on YouTube.

So there's a lot of things on YouTube where they can watch classes that I've taught. Oh, fantastic. Our national conference this year is in Chicago. We'll have about 200 or 300 different teachers that

come from all over the world. It's a week-long training. We do that every year, and then we have about 40 summer workshops coming up this summer that we put on.

That's all at our website. Fantastic. BlaineRayTPRS.com. I'll put that on my Twitter account so people can see it. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much.

Blaine, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to talk to you. So nice to talk to you. Very nice to talk to you, AJ. Thanks for asking me. Okay, have a great day.

Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye for now. Okay, wonderful. Wonderful to talk to Blaine. He had so many great things to say, so many great stories. And the key things I found from his interview, number one was the effect on students.

and he mentioned the word confidence, and I totally agree because I feel exactly the same way, that confidence is the number one thing that you need as an English speaker, that I need while I learn Spanish, that any language learner needs.

I think in schools they train people to think they need perfection. Perfection, perfection. And that's when you get so worried about making mistakes. And what that does, the school method, it kills your confidence because you become really worried and nervous and embarrassed all the time.

And when you're not confident, you do not speak fluently. You cannot communicate your ideas well. This method, using stories to learn English or any language, builds confidence. And that's key.

Because as you get that confidence, even if you make mistakes, and you will, even if you have some problems and you hesitate and need to think a little bit, that's okay too.

When you learn with this method, you will be able to communicate confidently. You can say what you mean. You can communicate your ideas and your feelings. Other people will understand you.

You will understand them. That is the key thing. And then later, of course, you'll keep improving. You'll get better and better. So the effect on students, on you.

The second thing that he mentioned, which also for me was a very big insight, was the effect on teachers. And this is something that affected me personally.

Teaching in this way, it's more effective, and that means that teachers become more confident. It means the job of teaching is more pleasant. It's more pleasurable. It's more fun.

When you see your students actually improving, it makes a huge difference to you as a teacher. In the past, before I used storytelling and the effortless English method, teaching was stressful for me. because I could see that the students were not making progress. But after, now that I'm using this method, I enjoy teaching.

I love it. I'm excited to teach. I love to just jump in front of a class and tell a story or give a lesson of any kind, because I know it's going to help the students. I can see they're responding.

I know it's fun for them. It's fun for me. It's fantastic. So storytelling is powerful for both students and for teachers. Now, TPRS, by the way, that's the official name of Blaine's method.

And I believe that it stands for Teaching Proficiency Through Reading and Storytelling. You don't really need to know all that. It's just called TPRS. It's a short way to say it.

And it's his particular method of using stories to teach language. In Effortless English, we use a version of his method. All right. In our mini-stories and our point-of-view stories, we tell stories to help you learn English, to help you become fluent.

And I add some NLP and Tony Robbins psychology as well to add a lot more emotion. And we also use actions, as Blaine Ray mentioned, that he started using actions when he first developed his teaching. So we combine all of that together. As he said, it's kind of a supercharged version of storytelling.

Storytelling is powerful. Storytelling is a much better way. Blaine mentioned that English learning, that language learning happens unconsciously. It happens naturally when you understand the language.

And the best way is listening to stories or listening to audios, natural, real language that you understand. And when you understand that, You don't need to be focusing on the parts. You do not need to focus on grammar or think about it.

You will naturally get a feeling for English grammar without studying the rules. That's why it's so powerful and also why it's so enjoyable. All right, let's go to question time. Time for me to answer your questions from Twitter.

Now, our first question from Twitter comes from Marlon. And Marlon says, are stories enough to help me become fluent? Are they enough, or do I need something else?

Yes, they are. They're enough. As Blaine said, his high school students, who learned only with stories, only with stories, became fluent in Spanish. And, of course, fluent means you can confidently communicate.

It doesn't mean you're perfect, but it means you can confidently communicate. Yes, stories are enough. Now, let me remind you that you can ask me a question on Twitter now, and my Twitter is AJHogue, the full address, twitter.com slash AJHogue, just my name, A-J-H-O-G-E.

Okay, here's a good question from... Decal 75. I understand you more than I understood Blaine Ray when he was speaking. Why? You have a very clear language.

I understand you 100%. I imagine that it's because Blaine was using a few words that you may not have understood. He was saying things like TPR. And I know what TPR is.

TPR is another teaching method called teaching through, what does it stand for anymore? Total physical response, that's right. Total physical response. So I know that, but probably a lot of you don't know what that means.

So he was using a few words in there or a few phrases that mention certain kinds of teaching, certain approaches. He said comprehensible input. Comprehensible, it's kind of a big word.

We don't use it very much in normal speaking. But comprehensible means understandable. So Blaine used that word, comprehensible. And then input means something that's coming in.

So comprehensible input, understandable input. It means something is coming in and you understand it. Now, in language teaching, we use this phrase to describe listening or reading.

That is fairly easy for you. So that's all it means. So some of those phrases you might not have understood from Blaine, just because they're kind of,

They're phrases that language teachers might know and use, but maybe everyone else doesn't know so well. So don't feel bad about that. It's okay. Okay, let's keep going with our Twitter questions.

Oh, another Twitter question from MHIJ. Do you ever use the same mini-story method in live classes? Yes, I do. It's my favorite thing to do. Of course, our courses...

our effortless English courses, use mini-stories. That's what I call them. I call them mini-stories. That means small stories. It's born from Blaine Ray's method, and we add a few other things to it, but it's basically TPRS, too.

So our mini-story method is used in all our courses. You listen to the recordings, and you respond to the questions. And that works, and it's powerful.

and it's very convenient because you can put it on your phone and carry your phone around, and you can use these stories every day. My favorite thing to do, however, is to do a mini story live, to do a lesson live. So I tell a story live, and I'm much better at doing it now than I was in Japan, and I know the technique better.

And so this is so much fun because we get a big group of people, and I tell the story, but as you know, I don't just tell the story, I ask a lot of questions. So the audience, you, help to create the story together with me. So I'll ask a question like, what was the woman's name?

And then the audience will shout suggestions, they'll guess, and then I'll choose one of their answers. So we're making the story together. And what I do is storytelling there's a lot of energy we use combined actions so people are shouting and jumping and it's so much fun it's super effective it's the best most powerful english lesson that i know of it's incredible it will help you learn very fast and you will not be thinking about vocabulary or grammar you'll be totally focused on this exciting fun experience

And as I mentioned, it's fun. It's fun for me. It's fun for them. Super high energy. It's great. So do I do them live? Yes, I do. All right, again, with Twitter questions, my Twitter is twitter.com slash AJ Hogue.

Let's see. Here's a good question. I like this one. It's Twitter name is Arudapaf. Can I use watching CNN or the BBC to compliment CNN? my learning, using my ears.

Is it useful? Using something like CNN or the BBC can be useful. It depends how you do it. And it depends on your level of understanding. We mentioned that phrase, comprehensible input, understandable.

So if you don't understand CNN, if it's too difficult for you right now, it will not help you. You'll be watching and You'll be hearing all these sounds. You won't really understand the words.

You're wasting your time. If, however, you're quite a high level, you're fairly advanced, and you understand most of it, you understand most of the English, you understand, let's say, 90%, then absolutely, yes, it will help you because then you can use the 90% and guess the other 10%. And that will help you improve your listening. You'll improve your understanding faster.

That's great. Another thing you could do is instead of just watching CNN, if it's too difficult for you, record maybe 10 minutes. Record one segment from CNN, 10 minutes long, 5 minutes long.

And then get the transcript or use subtitles. Sometimes they have captioning in English where you can actually read it on the screen what the people are saying. They can even do this live. It's called closed captioning.

So then you have that five minutes or ten minute segment. And instead of just watching CNN and not understanding, you can watch that little bit using the text, using the captions. And you can rewind and watch it again, rewind and watch it again, rewind and watch it again. So then it will become understandable to you.

That's another very good way to use CNN or the BBC or any television show or any movie. Good question. Okay, here's a nice comment, too, from Charlie. Nukchorus is his Twitter name.

He says, I noticed that Blaine's accent is a bit different than mine. Where is he from? So Blaine lives in Utah. You know, I should have asked him. I'm not sure if he's originally from Utah or if he just moved there.

But I'm not sure. I didn't notice an exact regional accent for him. But, yeah, he does have a little bit of a different accent than I do. I have what would be called a standard American accent, which would be the Midwest or the Western part of the United States.

However, I grew up in the South, so that may affect my speaking a little bit because there is a Southern United States accent. And I'm not sure about Blaine, but this is normal. We all have a little bit of different accents. We have different voices.

We have even just different styles of speaking. Each person has certain vocabulary they use the most often, and a different person will have a slightly different vocabulary.

They'll have certain favorite words, and other people will have other favorite words. So these little differences are normal, but I'm not exactly sure where Blaine is originally from. I don't know where he grew up.

And another comment from Charlie that is also a good one is that news acres are trained to speak in a very... formal kind of way. And it's not really the way regular people speak. So on one hand, yes, listening to CNN and the BBC is useful if you understand it using the methods I mentioned before.

But on the other hand, they do use a kind of announcer sort of language. I think newscasters are great to learn pronunciation from because they almost always use the very standard accent of the United States.

or for the BBC, for England. But they don't use a lot of slang. They don't use idioms. They don't use casual, everyday language so much. They're a little more formal because they're reading the news and they're trying to sound serious.

So you will get certain kinds of language from them, but you also miss certain kinds. And movies are better for that casual kind of English. Okay, let's talk. Oh, this is a great question.

Jolahoband is the Twitter name. What about beginners? If everything is new and there's no understanding for them, TPRS is storytelling method, mini story method is excellent for beginners. It's the best for beginners.

Blaine also mentioned using actions. He mentioned Dr. Asher. Dr. James Asher, who developed the method of total physical response. That's where you use commands and actions to teach.

Now that is also excellent for total beginners. And in fact, if I was going to teach a class of total beginners tomorrow, they had zero English, none at all.

And I also did not speak their language, so I couldn't do any translating. I would use actions in my first classes. Probably for about the first month, I would teach using actions.

So, like he said, stand up, and then I would stand up, and they would look at me, and then I'd say, sit down, and I'd sit down, and they'd look at me, and eventually they would understand that stand up means stand up, and sit down means sit down.

And then I would start using more and more and more commands and building sentences, long, long commands using several parts, And this would give them a core of language. They would start to understand English. And then I would use that same vocabulary then and start creating stories using those same words.

And in this way, you can build up and teach beginners without any translating at all. Now, if you can translate, let's say I had a class and every one of them spoke Spanish and I know a little bit of Spanish, well, then I might just immediately start with a story

and just translate some of the words for them so they could understand quite quickly. And in the first class, we could start using actions and stories at the same time.

But it is possible to teach without any translation at all to total beginners. So yes, the storytelling is great for total beginners. In fact, it is the best for total beginners.

What you do not want to do, do not teach total beginners grammar. Don't do that because, oh, man, you'll mess them up. You can cause a lot of problems for them.

You probably know because you learned grammar in the beginning with English. Most of you did. I'm sure you did. And I learned Spanish grammar in the very beginning.

It was the first lessons. We learned grammar, grammar, grammar. And now I can't stop thinking about it. It takes a long time to unlearn that and to instead learn the grammar naturally.

It's great if you can skip that and just immediately start learning with stories. It's fantastic. Okay, so these are some teacher questions, which is interesting. Some of you, obviously, are teaching language, teaching English.

I can't pronounce some of these Twitter names because they're so long. Adna Kazaman says, in the beginning teaching stages, using stories, should I ask questions or only tell the story? Ask questions.

Ask questions. So in the mini story method that I use, and the Blaine Ray's method, TPRS, it's really a method of asking questions to create a story. You're not just telling the story.

This is one of my mistakes when I taught that first class in Japan. I just told them a story. It still worked. It was still interesting. They still understood and it still helped them.

But Later I learned this technique of asking questions to create a story. It's much more powerful. And yes, you can, not only can you, you should teach beginners with questions.

Immediately start asking them questions. You can use easy questions, just yes and no questions. Even a low, low beginner can answer a yes or no question.

So you can say, the dog's name was Bill, and then you ask them, Was the dog's name Bill? Yes or no, it's super easy. And this way, because language involves both questions and statements, so teach them both right at the same time.

And this is also a way that keeps their brain working. This is the power of questions. When you ask a question, then you, the learner, must respond. If I ask you a question, your brain immediately starts thinking and using the language and then has to create a response.

That's why it's more powerful. It's not passive. Yes, yes, yes. Use questions. All right, on to our next segment, which is Effortless English News. What's happening in Effortless English?

What am I doing? What's coming soon? So what's happening or what has happened? I just recently went to Los Angeles, just got back. And in L.A., I recorded new VIP lessons.

Specifically, I recorded videos in a production studio. So I'm curious to see what the videos will look like, if they're higher quality than the ones I do myself. We'll see. You'll see this in a few months, VIP members.

I'll also be recording the audios for new VIP lessons. Soon, here in San Francisco, I'll be doing that. So lots of new VIP lessons will be coming soon. Interesting topics, as always.

Useful topics, powerful topics. Okay. As always, let's end with our code and our mission. Our code is simply the way we treat each other. It's the principles of our community, how we treat each other.

Number one, we do the best we can. That means we don't worry about being perfect. That's impossible. We do our best. We do the best we can. We do the right thing, number two.

We treat each other well. We don't insult each other, etc. And number three, we show each other we care. Actively show each other we care. We help each other.

We compliment each other sincerely. We show each other we care. And we have a mission, a deeper mission, more than just English. Our mission is to explore new opportunities for growth, growing as human beings, to bring confidence, vitality, and happiness to people all over the world, and to boldly go where we have never gone before.

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See you next time. Have a great day. Bye-bye.