Stories and Games for Bilingual and Foreign Language Education

Folk tales told with puppets, dolls, pictures and games can provide students with painless exposure to another culture and language. Professional storyteller Fran Stallings will remind us how it feels to encounter a new language by demonstrating traditional stories and games from Japan! We will join in the stories, learn songs & games, and try out the puppets, dolls, and pictures -- playing our way across the language barrier.

Then Fran will show us how we can apply these stories and games for K-12 teaching foreign languages, English as a second language, and bi-lingual telling as well as for cultural enrichment. We will learn how to use stories and games to introduce new vocabulary and concepts memorably, in a playful but meaningful context.

This workshop is based on Fran's many years of experience as interpreter for Hiroko Fujita, a Japanese educator and traditional folkteller with whom Fran toured America every spring from 1995 to 2008. Fran is the editor/adaptor of the English translation of Fujita-san's handbook, Stories to Play With (August House, 1999) and a collection of Fujita-san's stories, Folktales from the Japanese Countryside (Libraries Unlimited, 2007).