Stories are magic. Our brains love them. But why? Let us examine how powerful stories are, offer theories in neuroscience as to why, and the look at techniques for using them in your classroom.
Since this is a presentation on stories, let us start with one. This is not a typical story, though, It is what is called a Digitale, an English teaching technique developed by Hawaii-born Rex Tanimoto at Osaka Gakuin University, and it might be the single most useful thing you will learn from this paper.
What is a Digitale? It’s an extremely simple technique for teaching English. You tell students to make a story and do it in PowerPoint. That’s it. They write one or two sentences per slide, add illustrations, and then read their stories to other students. It is taking the oldest educational technique in the world, stories, and adding it to one of the newest, PowerPoint.
Here is a Digitale made by Rex’s college students, and in fact, it was the first one he ever showed me. It is called “Love at First Sight.” Try not to laugh.
Love At First Sight, by Yuki Yasuda, Akiko Nishimura, & Akiko Tomori (Note: Original English edited, and only about half the photos presented).
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| James hated himself. He was weak, fat, and short. He was also afraid of girls, and he couldn’t talk to them without feeling nervous.After going to a restaurant, he fell in love at first sight with a waitress whose name was Jenny. | He went to Jenny’s restaurant every day.His love for Jenny made him stalk her.
James followed Jenny home every day. One day, she saw him stalking her.
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Jenny thought James was strange. So she started avoiding him.James hated himself for what he had done. |
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| He wanted to change his personality and looks. He decided to start exercising a lot. Soon he had confidence in himself. | One day, Jenny spilled coffee on a customer by mistake. The customer started bullying her. James was walking past the restaurant and saw Jenny in trouble.James entered the restaurant and protected Jenny. Jenny started falling in love with James. | Then James asked her, “Do you believe in love at first sight?” “Yes, I do,” replied Jenny. After a few years, Jenny again said, “Yes, I do.”… during their wedding ceremony in a church. |
This story might seem a bit simplistic and stereotypical, but it was special for the students that made it. They were not what teachers refer to and the studious and motivated types, but, equipped with a digital camera and a good sense of story, they made a product, in less-than-loved English, that moved others to tears and laughter. And isn’t that a noble end of an English class, making our learners able to move others to tears and laughter?
This Digitale was not exceptional; it was just the first one I saw. Others were funny, inspiring, and thought-provoking too. And they meant so much to the learners who made and shared them.
I was deeply impressed by the potential of Digitales, especially in an age when English teaching tends to be so dull, mechanical and constraining. Control is so often our key concern in the English class. Yet here was a method that used language to release them. I thought it was going to be the next big thing in Japan, and I was ready to commit to it. It turned out not to be, for reasons I will explain later but know I would like you to ponder the benefits of this technique.
The Shift To the Left Digitales. So simple. Yet, it might be more useful than you think. Now in our sphere of English teaching, we’re experiencing this constant shift to the left. By shift to the left, I mean this: A shift towards input instead of output. This is happening because of what is becoming increasingly important in our field: tests. We are right in the middle of the age of psychometrics: measuring ability by multiple choice test scores. To get into a good junior high, senior high, or university, you must pass these tests. Then think about TOEIC, Eiken, and IELTS. These are tests that just measure input skills, listening and reading comprehension, not output, and yet are critical to getting a good job on graduation.
As a result, English departments all over Japan are teaching more and more input-oriented English: listening and reading. There are whole departments that measure English proficiency merely by input abilities. There are English departments who sell themselves by promising to raise TOEIC scores by 200 points. Now we language professionals know there is more to proficiency than just multiple choice scores, and so do the TOEIC, IELTS, and EIKEN people. That is why each of them has released speaking and writing tests. Output tests…that no one uses.
Unfortunately, those who shape policy are not language professionals. They are academics, employers, parents, and the students themselves, and they want numerical scores.
And maybe there is another reason for the shift to the left too.
Output
is difficult to teach. How many times have you taught a speaking class where there are more students speaking Japanese than English? You have so little control over the output. It is messy. So the shift to the left is a way to add order as well.
Nonetheless, the shift is causing problems: we are increasingly moving into systems that reward passive learners, or systems that reward analytical instead of relational learners. Of all the learning styles I have read about, and this one is absent from Rebecca Oxford’s excellent work on the topic (XXX) , analytical and relational learning styles (XXX) were the most interesting. Analytical learners, the engineers, are good at remembering details; they are good at taking tests; they like to study by themselves, and they are motivated by scores. Relational learners are more global, more intuitive, and maybe more creative. They are good at understanding the whole rather than the details; they are terrible at tests; they like to study with others, and they are motivated by relationships. They are smart, but they are not very good at memorizing facts, and so, not tend to do poorly on input-oriented proficiency tests. The shift to the left is working against them. Education is increasingly failing them, unless, you do Digitales.
Advantages and Disadvantages
When Rex started doing Digitales in class, it was much harder than now. Not many students knew how to use PowerPoint. They didn’t have easy access to digital cameras or computers. these were disadvantages back then, but in this day and age, they are greatly reduced. Almost every student above high school year one has PowerPoint skills, most have digital cameras and computers right there in their pockets. Doing Digitales now is far easier than it used to be.
So, what are the advantages? In addition to being fun, comprehensible, multisensory, and in most cases cute, there is another advantage I would like to look at, efficacy in learning. For 50 years neuroscientists psychologists and educators have been studying why narratives are better for learning than other techniques.
Imagine two formats for information delivery: stories versus explanations, or narrative versus expository. We absolutely need both, but it seems our brains greatly prefer the narrative. There is something about the narrative format that causes to learn more information from stories and remember it longer. Let us look at a little bit of the research saying so:
Oaks (1995) compared retention from traditional lectures to storytelling. Testing listeners right after hearing the lecture or story, 3 weeks later and, 5 weeks later, he found that even after five weeks, about twice as many people in the group hearing the stories still remembered the key points. Berhowitz and Taylor (1981) found children recalled significantly more information from the narrative passages than they did from expository passages with similar content. George and Schaer (1986) found kindergarten children’s recall of prose content was significantly higher when given by storytelling than other means, including television! In 1980 three researchers from the University of California, Graesser, Hoffman, and Clark, compared the memorability of narrative texts (such as the story of Noah’s ark) and expository texts (such as an encyclopedia entry for armadillos). Twelve texts were rated by the college students for their narrativity, familiarity, and interestingness. The narrative texts were read about twice as fast as the expository texts, yet the narrative texts were remembered twice as well as the encyclopedic texts. There was a high correlation between narrativity and the amount of information recalled (0.92) yet familiarity and interestingness had a very small effect on both reading time and amount recalled.
Stories can be actively used by the learners as well, to increase retention. In 2013 psychology professor, Dan Johnson, of Washington and Lee University, found students making nano narratives to remember abstract concepts, with just two or three lines of information, had improved recall over several days. Bower, Callahan, Clark (1969) at Stanford asked students to memorize and recall ten sets of unrelated words. One group was told to memorize the words any way they wanted, while the second was told to make stories using the words. The story group was able to remember six to seven times as many words as the naturalist group. Higbee’s study (1988) found similar results, with 2-7 times the recall in the story group. The results? In the worst case, students using stories only remembered twice as many words.
Using stories
Granted, word recall is not exactly vocabulary learning, but as far as the brain goes, it closes. And unfortunately, some of the students in Higbee’s study only remembered twice as many of the words as the other group. Only TWICE as many? I think any of us would be utterly delighted if we could increase vocabulary retention by 100%. And yet, I doubt any of us are using this way to increase retention. I am not. Why isn’t anyone taking advantage the huge retention efficacy stories can give?
Well, someone is, and big time: the advertising industry. The sole purpose of those dozens of TV commercials you see every day is to get you to remember the product name, the brand, not even consciously. Then later, when you go to the store to buy a detergent, without even knowing why you pick up the target brand. Advertisers know that getting your brain to release dopamine at the same time you see their product name makes you retain it. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that controls all drive and reward. It also causes deeper learning. Our brains are built to remember things that make us feel good.
So, advertisers use the movie stars you love, the men in expensive cars, the women in sexy dresses; they use creamy chocolate, 50% off, and any other way they can to get you to release dopamine. Then too, one of their favorites, even in a ten-second commercial is to use a story. They know. Stories result in deeper learning.
You can find hundreds of advertisements using stories on YouTube, I suggest you look at one in which Google advertises their search engine. Search “Parisian Love Google” and watch. The ad has no explanation, just a story, and yet it advertises all the search engine functions.
Watch it twice and you might get teary eyed. But why is that? That probably would not happen if you heard the same explanation twice, but it worked here because of the neurotransmitter release. You were wrestling with the cognitive load and language processing the first time through. You can get more into the emotional side, the narrative, the second time through. Again, this is what advertisers do to your brain. They cause the release of neurotransmitters, especially dopamine. With giggling babies, with romantic couples, with awesome food, they cause dopamine release, the neurotransmitter of reward, and they make you learn their product.
Well, if Google can do that, then I ask, why can’t we?
We are not as limited to something as mundane as a search engine. We have the whole world to play with. Even if we have to present a limited set of English, we have the world. In fact, if you think about it, other academic fields use stories to enhance memory. Who discovered gravity and how? Where was Archimedes when he discovered a way to measure volume and what did he cry? Who was the young genius who supposedly failed math in grade school (a myth, though)? How did Julius Caesar die? How did some Dutchmen get Manhattan Island, which later became New York, from some Native Americans? On the other hand, I doubt you know how Boyles Law was discovered, and maybe not even by whom? (That was a joke.)
There is so much evidence supporting the use of narratives to increase classroom learning, and yet, we hardly use them. And yet, we do. Maybe this is the secret behind the success of extensive reading. It is growing so quickly, but from the beginning, I felt its proponents missed what it was really doing. In fact, I remember taking Richard Day’s TESOL course on extensive reading. It was about ten years ago in Seoul, and he said it works – and there really is a lot of research that supports its efficacy in language learning – it works because it is simple and learners do a lot of it. The stories are enjoyable so they keep reading. Even then, it piqued my curiosity that there was more coming from extensive reading being pleasurable than just motivation to continue. Maybe the pleasure was what caused the learning, through neurotransmitter release.
Were I to have that conversation again today, I would add that the narrative structure of these books improves recall as well. Stories are brain-compatible. But what exactly does that mean? Again, we must turn to neuroscience.
The Neuroscience of Stories
One advantage stories have is their ability to elicit emotion. We have long known emotion and learning are deeply correlated, and also that emotion and cognition are not two separate things. Neuroscientists like Passoa tell us emotion is a form of cognition (XXX) and all cognition uses emotion.
Stories that arouse your emotions, like the Google ad, do so through the release of three important neurotransmitters: a) Dopamine – the neurotransmitter of drive, reward, and deeper learning; b) Cortisol, the stress hormone that causes greater focus; and c) everyone’s favorite, Oxytocin, the neurotransmitter of bonding. Neuroscientist Paul Zak has been doing amazing research on cortisol and oxytocin release caused by moving stories. He found that touching stories cause the release of both, resulting in greater attention, more sympathy, and changes in attitudes. Because of the oxytocin release, people were even more willing to give money to strangers in need, or charities, after seeing a touching story. However, one of the interesting things he discovered was that just watching a video of characters going through a random series of encounters, as happens when one takes a walk, did not have the same effect. There must be a particular structure for this to happen, a structure you know. It is the arc of the rising action, climax, and falling action of a story.
So why does the format of a story, where events occur one after the other have such a great impact on our learning? The answer is that because we are wired that way (Wildrich, 2012). “A story, if broken down into the simplest form is cause and effect. And that is exactly how we think. 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” (p.1 ). If I do this, then I hope to get this result” This is an unconscious, uncontrollable process, even when we are asleep.
A brain is a prediction machine. This view is gaining strength in neuroscience. In fact, according to Daniel Schacter at Harvard, the sole purpose of memory is to allow us to predict what will happen next (xxx). That is why we don’t remember the details. Amalgamated gist memories work better for predicting than a plethora of exact memories.
A brain is a simulation machine. We see a cause and simulate the effect.
Cause and effect. It is how we think, which brings us to the most interesting language theories of our age, one with crucial implications for our field, language teaching. It is called embodied simulation. Neuroscientists have long wondered how memories are stored. Is our brain a filing cabinet? Are memories a collection of old movies and photos? And how about language? Do we have an internal dictionary we use to define every word we hear? The answer is “no” for all of these. We now believe that our brains use the same networks to do three things, to process incoming sensory information, to store memories, and to predict what will happen. And to do one more thing: to make meaning from language.
The networks that do this are our sensory and motor cortices: our visual cortex, our auditory cortex, our motor cortex, our somatosensory cortex that controls touch, and so on.
So, when you see a photo of Justin Timberlake in a magazine, your visual cortex fires up and does all the visual processing, recognizing that visual input as representing a male, a human, etc. Memories of seeing him before, located in the same visual processing area, makes you realize who he is. He cannot hear him singing, but your auditory cortex fires up with memories of what he sounds like. You realize he is a singer, so your motor cortex might make the networks holding memories of and controlling your throat and voice to fire.
The exact same thing happens if you just hear the words “Justin Timberlake” (and maybe the visual image networks for “timber” and “lake” fire briefly too, but then fade out). And if the speaker goes on to say “Justin has a velvety voice” the sensory area in your brain for fingers and the feel of velvet will fire too (Wildrich). So, rather than just looking words up in a mental dictionary, we are simulating. To simulate, we are using the same networks connected to our sensory mechanisms, which is why we call it embodied cognition.
So, with the new understanding that our brains are cause-and-effect simulation machines, and rely on the sensory areas of our brain to process the world, it should be easier to understand why narratives are more brain-compatible than explanations. Narratives are cause and effect. Stories are sensory. The data in them are already in the “right format” so to speak. In contrast, when we hear or read an explanation, we have to do a lot of translating to get the information into the narrative cause and effect format our brains understand. We have to visualize what the explanation means and what previous experiences it relates to.
Other researchers have been exploring how our personal identities are made up of stories (XXX). Jeremy Hsu found: “Personal stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversations.” In fact, they represent a code of not just who we are, but also who we wish to be. Everyone is living one movie or another.
Maybe the true value of stories lie in something the great biologist, EO Wilson once said, “The stories we tell ourselves and others are our survival manuals” (2002). Survival manuals: the guides and metaphors that help us figure out how to navigate through life. Stories are encapsulated experience. They help us hone our social skills. Oatley, Mar, and others reported in two studies that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.
Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”
The success of our species is mainly due to the way we have made these manuals of encapsulated experience transferable. Uri Hasson from Princeton examined someone telling a story and someone listening, and found something amazing. Their brains linked up.
The person telling the story, reliving a personal experience, would have different areas of the brain firing up as she told it. The brains of the listeners started doing the exact same things in the same order. When the teller “had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts, and emotions into the listeners’ brains.” In other words, stories allow us to link brains and pass on our rich experiences.
Digitales as Tools of the Brain
And therein lies the beauty of Digitales. They are stories, multi sensory, totally comprehensible, emotion-arousing and they were growing in popularity. They were the perfect technique for high school students, so Rex Tanimoto started going around to Suita City high schools doing workshops. Digitales caught on. Osaka Gakuin started holding Digitales Festivals and they were a huge hit.
One reason is that they were not boring. If you have ever been a judge at an English speech contest, then you know how hard work it is. After 15 presentations, your mind is numb, and so are those of all the students present. Painful. Digitales festivals were not like that at all. The visual effect made them accessible and interesting to everyone who was there. I remember being surprised at how fresh I felt after four hours of watching Digitales, and I actually wanted more. The pictures and words on the screen made them so much more accessible.
And so Digitales were growing. Osaka Gakuin even built a studio around Rex. There were 900 entrants to the last festival we held and that was just in Suita City alone. Nara Kyouiku Iinkai got interested too and contracted Rex and me to do Digitales workshops at their Super English Tomigaoka High School. That is a special high school designated by the Ministry of Education to make a super English program. I could see Digitales going national and we were just on the point of doing so, when, as I said, something happened.
It was a Friday. Rex and I were supposed to do a workshop at Tomigaoka Selhi. Rex called me up that morning and said “Curtis, I was out skin diving yesterday and I think I caught something. It feels like the flu. So can you do Tomigaoka by yourself today?” I said, “Sure.” And it was easy. Doing a Digitales workshop just meant telling them to write stories in one 45-minute class, and then to read them to other students in the next.
So I did it and called Rex a couple days later. I told him it all went well, which he was glad to hear, and then he said he had something to tell me. He said, “I went to the doctor and it is not the flu. It’ is cancer. Lung cancer.” I just couldn’t believe it. Rex is one of the fittest guys I know. He exercises every day. He does not smoke. I tried to tell him it was a pulmonary embolism or something, but it wasn’t. It was lung cancer, stage four.
Well, we tried to make the best of it and even started a rumor that he wasn’t sick at all, but just skipping. Here is a photo I took of Rex in the hospital, holding beer and cigarettes.
Unfortunately, though, Rex didn’t last long. He left us, and without Rex, all the steam went out of Digitales. I did not want to do the workshops. I did not have the heart to run the festivals. I did not want to take it national, not without Rex. So, Digitales died too.
Until now, that is. Two things happened, both in the last few months. One is that the Pan-SIG conference organizers asked me to do a plenary on storytelling. This one. And how could I talk about storytelling without talking about Rex and Digitales? The other is that, after about ten years, I was asked to teach Digitales again. One of the teachers from Nara’s Tomigaoka High School, where we taught Digitales, Hiroshi Izumi, is now working in another Ministry specially-designated “Global” high schools, Unebi High School in Nara Prefecture. He is in charge of making the English program, and he asked me to come and teach Digitales. Earlier this year, I did and it was great. I had forgotten how good Digitales are.
That led me to rediscover some of the wonderful things about this approach. There is something inherently uplifting about a student making a slide like this and sharing it. They are doing, not just hearing and reciting. There is something inherently uplifting about entertaining others, no matter how weak your English is. The learners, weak and strong, become the givers instead of the receivers. It is kind of like entering the adult world for them. And this brings us to the real value of Digitales: It has no real bias for language proficiency.
It is not the best language speakers that get the accolades, it is the most creative, the most visual, the most devoted, no matter what their TOEIC score is. This puts English back in its proper place, not to be a goal in itself, but to be a conduit. As Mark Pagel said, “Language is the voice of our genes.” 
This is one of the students at Unebi High School, Saki Nio. She wasn’t the best English student in the class. In fact, she might have been near the bottom in proficiency, but her Digitale was a big hit. It was a really funny story. Look at her face. It’s glowing. That’s exactly how she looked when other people raved about her story. This was the girl who felt bad about her English abilities, who had no confidence, but Digitales changed that for her. It is students like Saki that we really need to touch, and I can’t think of any other English activities that do so as easily.
So this is what Rex gave us: a superb, brain friendly way to teach output and full of Aloha. In fact, that is just what our own Nathan Furuya said about Rex at his memorial. “He was a guy full of Aloha from the top of his head to the tips of his toes.” I have lost a lot of friends and family over the years, but I think it is Rex I miss the most. And there is no way I could do a presentation on storytelling without bringing the master in. Thanks, Rex.
You might or might not be able to use Digitales in your class. After all, there is a fair amount of overhead. Nonetheless, there are other ways to use stories, and one of the best is to just tell a story at the end of class. If you have an extra five minutes, tell a story. You don’t need to tie it to vocabulary practice, or comprehension questions, or quizzes. Good stories drive themselves.
Stories in the classroom can be amazing. When you start telling a story, especially one that fits their moral development, the otherwise noisy class falls silent, eyes turn towards you, everyone listens intently. Why? Because good stories are good for them, and intuitively they know it. They are good for them in a deep way. Stories touch their hearts and souls. Telling stories, the manuals of life, help them grow in areas they intuitively know are crucial.
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