Telling Stories

Telling stories is a basic English usage task that we use on a daily basis. Unfortunately, students sometimes get caught up in trying too hard to speak English 'correctly' and can get lost. This at the cost of the story becoming difficult to understand or even incoherent. This lesson plan is aimed at helping students give structure to their relating of true stories.
Aim: Learning the basic structure and expressions used when telling true stories
Activity: Listening to a story, text arrangement, questionnaire, structure study and final story telling segment
Level: Intermediate - Upper Intermediate
Outline:
Tell the class a true story about some experience that has happened to you. Make sure to follow the story telling structure outline used during the lesson:
Introduction: Introduce the story by telling what kind of story it is
Beginning: How the story started
The Story: The main events related in order
The End: What has changed or how things are now
Moral: Final comments or moral conclusions about the story
Follow up your story with some basic comprehension questions.
Ask the students to put the reading comprehension into the correct order.
Have students underline key vocabulary that introduce and relate the sequence of events.
Discuss this vocabulary as a class.
Ask students to fill out the questionnaire. You can also do this activity as a pair work exercise with students asking each other the questions.
Ask students to review the story telling structure. Point out how your story and the reading comprehension follow the structure layout.
Ask students to use the information from the questionnaire to write their own true story.
Have students get into pairs and read each other the story. Ask students to pay careful attention to the story as they will need to relate the story to another partner.
Ask students to find another partner and relate the story that they have just been told to the new partner.
For Homework: Ask students to plan and write another true story of about 100 words.
Answer the following questions:
Think of a story that has happened to you or a friend of yours that is remarkable. What happened?
Was this a happy or sad story? Why?
What were the main events of the story? In what order did they happen?
How have things changed because of this story? What are things like now?
What lessons did you learn from the story?