Personal and Collective Narrative Meaning Making in the EFL Classroom

Personal narratives are among the dominant forms of folklore. Through these stories, we make individual meaning and negotiate collective meanings simultaneously. Such a pervasive narrative practice should find a prominent role in FL teaching and learning. In order to feel a foreign language, we must first of all feel it as a genuine means of personal expression, somehow filtering our L1 selves through the new words, thus beginning a process whereby the new language becomes part of who we are. Low proficiency sometimes prevents students from feeling entitled to engage in such a process, but the benefits of narrating do not depend solely on linguistic correctness. This paper asserts the importance of employing personal narratives with university trainee primary teachers (who will be called on to teach English as well as all other subjects), with a view to encouraging them to use English in the process of narrative meaning making. Narratives collected from individual trainee teachers will be analysed, as well as collective co-narrations, with a view to discussing the ways narrative can be employed. The result is a collective narrative woven through individual stories negotiated in performance during classroom interaction. This narrative practice can represent a most effective source of motivation during training and serve as a tool for developing a sense of authenticity when teaching the language in the future.