Mario Rinvolucri, author of “Once Upon a Time: Using stories in the language classroom” talk to us about storytelling, one of the “most compelling and ancient of human activities”. How can stories give students meaningful, comprehensible and motivating input? Listen to find out.
I recorded this podcast with Mario in 2019. He passed away in 2025. Mario is, in my opinion, one of the best ELT authors and thinkers. He had an amazingly creative mind, never shied away from controversy. I was so sad to hear that he’d died, but pleased that I was able to have this converstaion with him.
Using Stories in Language Teaching- Transcript
Ross Thorburn: Hi, Mario. Thanks for joining us. Do you want to tell us, to begin with, what is it that makes stories work? Why are stories so compelling and so useful for language teaching?
Mario Rinvolucri: When Pilgrims began in '74, my boss was the one who started it, who took the very small financial risk of starting a summer school. He said to me, "When you teach executive students, people who have big responsibilities in their firms, I know you love telling stories at your classes, but Mario please don't lose me the students by telling them Little Red Riding Hood."
Really, you keep a strike sense of proportion. There was a group who really did need to get their mouths around the past simple. After a lot of thought, I decided to dissipate James. I'm teaching this class, not you mate. I went in and I told Little Red Riding Hood. There was a manager from Italy. He was a sales manager.
At the time, it was peak fear time, which was, "All the better to eat you with, my dear." Just before I uttered that sentence, [speaking Italian] . Stop! At this point, my three‑year‑old daughter says, "Don't go on." It's frightening. Now, I think that he was dealing rather well with the past simple. He wasn't thinking about that. He was thinking first as the child himself.
He was thinking second as a parent. I don't think you could find two more powerful roles of the teacher than the role I've decided to take that day. Into the bargain, there will have been whatever negative and positive feelings he had towards me as a human.
Ross: In that case, there is it about bringing in such strong emotions into the class that the students almost forget about the language, and they're just caught up in the emotions of the story.
Mario: The emotions will always be there. The only people who don't feel emotions are people in graveyards. The ones under the ground. There is emotion everywhere. It's not separable. You can't separate out the cognitive because the cognitive is part of the emotions.
Ross: OK. Emotions are always there, but I think we can probably agree that there's a lot of texts, or stories out there, and a lot of course books that probably hit the only emotion that they maybe promote is boredom. Would you agree with that?
Mario: I would never dare to say that about the whole student population, no, because there are some students who have a passionate interest in X. If you happen to have a passage on X or a listening on X, that student will be ecstatic.
Ross: Let's say there's a potential audience on just about any text. Presumably as a teacher, when you're bringing stories into the class, you're obviously looking for something that's going to engage all of the students, or any many of them as possible. How do you go about selecting or picking those stories?
Mario: I try to find something which finds me first and which, I think, if I can find a story which has certain Shakespearean‑like themes. Not with a complicated language, but with some of the deep human emotions, like Othello and jealousy, mad jealousy.
If you touch one of those themes, it's very hard for a normal human being not to be involved. That's how we feel at theaters.
Ross: I suppose then, in that example, the students are going to be so focused on the story that they're maybe not very conscious of the language.
Mario: They're accessing those parts of their minds and their internal setup in a way which makes them incredibly open. In suggestopedia, for example, which is one of the messages that people talk about, and which is still widely used, it's music that has that opening uproar in the concert readings. This is simply another way of getting that opening up.
In the opening up, the sounds of the language begin to feel less strange. You might ask me about beginners. What do you do with beginners in the language? You tell a bilingual story. Do you speak modern Greek?
Ross: No, Mario. Only English and Chinese, I'm afraid.
Mario: You're a perfect subject within this story.
Ross: OK.
Mario: This is a story about a bear, an arkoúda . This bear, this arkoúda is wondering through the dásos. Dásos is a place with many, many, many trees close together. OK. You've got a picture of this arkoúda, a brown arkoúda, walking through the dásos.
The arkoúda suddenly looks up because he hears a noise above and the arkoúda looks up, and he sees the pouliá flying to the south. The arkoúda thinks, "Hmm, the pouliá are flying to the south. It means it's time now koimithó. It's time now [snores] koimithó. It's time to go to sleep." The arkoúda walks on through the dásos. You remember the dásos is a place with many trees.
The arkoúda looks up at the déntra , the déntra are the trees, so looks up at the déntra and he sees the fýlla. The yellowy brown fýlla are falling from the déntra. The arkoúda says again, " ine ora na komitho." The arkoúda walks slowly towards a big speleo. I'm not going to explain that to you because you understand speleo from speleologist.
This big hole in the ground, this big speleo, this big cave. The arkoúda goes into the speleo and what does she find there? She finds a lot of fýlla, which are now dry from the past year. She pounds up the fýlla and very, very soon, she lies down on the fýlla. Very soon, the arkoúda begins [snores] na komithi. OK? I haven't gone all through the whole story. Since you don't have a real motivation learning Greek, you get fed up. I think you see how easy it is if you prepared properly to actually produce a story which is coherent, understandable all the way through. You obviously have to prepare carefully as to what you're going to put into the target language.
Ross: I love that. It's such a great example of using the student's first language in class, which is something that often doesn't happen enough. It also models something that's perfectly normal for bilinguals, which is using both languages together at the same time.
It's also perfect for beginners. What about, do you have any examples of getting students to bring their own examples of stories to class?
Mario: I don't know if you've come across Ashton‑Warner. She's interesting because she was an ordinary primary schoolteacher. This was shortly after the end of World War II. She was sent the books which were being used in primary in Britain. The stories were about Jim and John, I think, and the dog they had, whose name I now forget.
All the pictures were of suburban, sort of south London. When she looked at these books, she realized they had nothing to do with the Murray kids she was to be teaching next Monday. She put them all respectfully in a cupboard and shut the door and then equipped herself with pens which wrote large and clearly and large sheets of cardboard.
She asked the kids when she greeted them, obviously she was the new teacher, and she said to the group, were about 25 kids, all of them Murray, "What are the most important words in your head this morning?" She asked them to come to her desk and the first one was asked, "What are the most important words in your head?"
He said, for example, "A knife, bomb, aeroplane, screaming." A lot of pretty violent words. She writes them down and says, "OK. Take these home and try to get your brothers, and sisters, and parents, if possible, interested in the words I've written for you.
If, the next day, the cardboard came back pristine clean, she knew nothing had happened, and either this kid needed extra help or a different approach. In many cases, they came back filthy because of a lot of mud around in the place they lived. It was a rainy place. Then, she began to realize that, probably, these were keywords.
The clean bits of paper she tore up in front of the group and asked those kids to come back and give her real keywords that were worth telling the family about and that would, obviously, involve getting things dirty. You see how basic this is? Really, really basic.
This woman then reconstructed a whole course around those words. She began then to introduce the necessary grammar words to say things about them.
Ross: That's a fantastic example. You can't get much more student‑centered than that, can you? Moving on, I think the normal thing that happens after reading a story or looking at any kind of text in a course book is they get filled up with comprehension questions. Do you want to tell us about some of the problems with comprehension questions?
Mario: I have a quite good professional relationship with Jeremy Harmer. What I ask myself as I think about questions after a reading passage in his books is, how does this man know that the path that the 14‑year‑old in Cairo doesn't understand needs a comprehension question?
Does he have a special line to the Holy Ghost, which allows him to produce omnivalent comprehension questions, which will be as relevant to the kid in Cairo as to someone in one of the stands, who is the company director? It's perfectly clear that that's impossible. Should he waste paper? Obviously, what part of it is, is because the publishers need paper to write things on.
That's how they get their money. It's absolutely aberrant. It's crazy. This is the cognitive level. Forget about emotions for a moment. At the cognitive level, how does he know? He doesn't. He's probably influenced by these classes he's taught, which are often in Spanish context because he's worked a lot in Latin American and Cuban classes.
It's mad. As a construct, it's wrong. You might say, "What can you do to do it differently?" OK. People in the class know each other. They know each other emotionally, but also cognitively.
If I discover in that I'm learning German and you're particularly good at German verbs, and there's a verb which I don't understand the function of, I'm going to write a little question, "What does [gibberish] mean and how does it work?" I put your name on that bit of paper. I write questions to other people in the group according to what I'm asking.
This was a technique invented, I think, by Pilgrims colleague who worked in Italy during the year called Boudin, Richard Boudin. He said, "OK. Write questions about anything you don't understand, but direct them to somebody in the class who might help. If you really can't find anybody, then direct them to me, me the teacher."
What I've noticed is that, in Boudin's technique, it's not by chance. They don't just write a list and go [gibberish] and ask him that. No, they ask on the whole, relevant questions. Relevant to what they know about the other learners because they know a lot about their co‑learners...
Transcription by CastingWords with help from Eleni Symeonidou