Level: High Beginner or Intermediate

Skill: Speaking

Purpose: To use drawings or pictures to aid community members in understanding your personal history. The goal is to get to know people and to practice speaking, as well as to find out how to tell your story better.

What to Do:

Step 1: Preparing. Look through your photos and see if you have any of your family, your home, or special friends. Have a pencil and paper handy as well.

Step2: Telling your story. Tell about your life, including your family and any other interesting facts about yourself, such as your home town, your interests. Use the pictures or make simple stick figure line drawings to help your listeners understand. They may provide some words for you, as you go along.

Step 3: Retelling the story.W hen you have finished, ask your LH to tell your story back to you and record what they say. You will be able to tell if you communicated clearly by how closely their story is like yours.

Step 4: Clear up misunderstandings. If your listeners didn’t completely understand your story, try again to get across the confused points. Then record them retelling your story again.

Step 5: Listen to your story. Now listen to the corrected recording and pay attention to how the native speaker expressed it. How was that different from you?

Step 6: Retell your own story. Now try again to tell your story to different people, in light of what you learned from this process.