A few days ago Fleming had the opportunity of receiving the North American story teller Donna Washington member of the Dream On Productions.

Dream on Productions is a company working with international theatre companies to take educational entertainment in English, exclusively to the bilingual teaching schools in South America. They produce stories and workshops directed by English native speakers to English Language students and teachers, and they do it in a creative combination of theatre and story-telling.

This experience has told us that the storytellers have a big flexibility to adapt themselves to the different levels of English and age of their audience.   They can vary the vocabulary difficulty and linguistic structures, and for that reason the audience can be 5 year old children to youngsters of 18 years old.

The importance of working with English speaking story tellers, lies in children responding better to real situations such as: having an English native speaker story teller visitor.

Krashen (1983) said: “Language is taught better when used to transmit messages, not when taught for conscious learning”

The stories told by these people, are traditional, not so well known stories and because of their international repertoire, it helps those listening to understand the differences and similarities between different cultures and individuals and also provides basic themes to discuss about values. This also allows them to increase their vocabulary and grammar.

Each storyteller has his own style, generally they tell between 1 and 4 stories depending on the group (age, English knowledge level, audience maturity). 

For the younger ones the stories are short, for those with a better knowledge of English the stories are more complete.

The professional storytellers do not read their stories, they keep their eyes on the audience. They use different voices and sounds, facial expressions, much corporal language and movements, and are able to create different images in our minds.

With all these abilities Donna Washington visited us for two days, and she captured her audience from P1 to S5 pupils.