CHAPTER IX
STORY TELLING AN AID TO VERBAL EXPRESSION
NEARLY all children find fluent speech as readily as birds find song and flowers find perfume. Occasionally, there is a “different” child, though, who through shyness, slow motor reaction or a retarded brain development has difficulty in using words as a medium of expressing himself.
There is always the problem, too, of the foreign-born child. We find him a patient, tongue-tied little scrap of humanity clad in the garb of Italy or Russia or Germany clinging to his mother’s skirts when the big vessel docks and as dazed as she is at the babel of strange speech that deafens, stuns him. Then we see him in school and his linguistic problem becomes more complicated. He is put into a class where the ordinarily complex matters of reading, writing, and ciphering are made increasingly more complex because they are presented to him in a foreign language. The school curriculum leaves small space in the day for teaching a child to talk. Tony, discouraged, baffled, puzzled, drifts farther and farther into his great silence and is dubbed a dunce, because he doesn’t know what his teacher is talking about.
What shall we do with Tony who forms a big unit in our ever increasing foreign population? How shall we quickest help him and every child to that ready expression through speech that means power, efficiency, self-control in later years?
There was my own, special Tony—a quaint little man of five in yellow breeches, a green shirt and a fur cap, which latter he persisted in wearing during his entire school day for fear that some one might steal it. Tony was, “out of Naples.” His melting brown eyes danced with delight at a bit of crimson paper, a gold orange produced as a model for the painting lesson, a red rose that meant a sense game. But Tony’s warm, red lips remained persistently closed. Days melted into weeks and then were months and still Tony was dumb. Ideas he had. Words he had not, although I had tried daily to teach him to say, good morning, good-by, ball, clay, blocks and like words.
One day Tony electrified me, though. He was always an attentive, close listener during my story hour that ended the morning. Because the children were, in the majority, foreign, I selected short, repetitional stories for telling. The children were fascinated with the quaint old folk tale of “The Teeny Tiny Lady.” As I told it, they had formed a habit of joining me when I reached a familiar phrase.
“Tell the Teeny Tiny Lady,” they begged again and as I finished the story, Tony’s eyes danced, his lips parted—
“Once upon a time there was a lady, who lived in a house in a village,” he began in clear, pure English. With a little help he almost retold the story. It was amazing, but through the inspiration of the other children’s enthusiastic story interest, the many repetitions of the story and its simple, cumulative structure Tony had learned nearly a hundred words. He talked after that, and he told us stories. The story had unloosed his tongue.
Stories help children to verbal expression.
In the case of a foreign child who must be taught English, or the American-born child who is shy and so lacking in the power of expressing himself through words, we will use the old folk tale that repeats its words and phrasing with happy familiarity and so teaches speech.