Developing English language teaching metaphorical associative cards (ELTMAC)

1. ELTMAC Workshop, 2018
Richard J. Stockton
Retrieved from http://sydneydepauw.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-heros-journey-and-universal.html

2. Introduction
Teaching English language, I became familiar with a
number of narrative card games for ELT, but felt there
was something wrong with many of them. These games
tended to form Markov chains, just streams of random
events without any plot or meaning. So I began to work
on my own set of story cards, which I chose to base on
fairytale. Between drawing on theory, and beta testing
game play with my students and colleagues, I saw I was
improving the storied play. During these trials, I
sometimes had an eerie sense that the game cards were
bringing up thoughts and feelings from deep in the
psyche.

3. Research questions
Action research question: would it be possible to design a
narrative story card game for ELT based on the archetypes
and journey?
Empirical research question: could an archetype and
journey based ELT card game significantly benefit English
language learning?

4. Jung and archetypes

6. The archetypes
“Like the instincts, the collective thought patterns of the human
mind are innate and inherited” (Jung, 1964/1988, p.75).
Universal, “operative within all human beings regardless of
history, gender, race, geography, or time” (Mills, 2013, p.21).
Particularly clear in “the delusions of paranoiacs, the fantasies
observed in trance-states, and the dreams of early childhood”
(Jung,1936, p.103).

7. self - center of personality,
persona - mask or role
shadow - our disowned character
anima & animus - feminine and masculine, gender relations
great mother - deep Earth
child - our origin,
wise old man - authority
Others include,
the hero, the princess in distress, the animal friend, the
mentor, the trickster, the underworld, the maze, the
tower, fog, and the quest or journey.

8. “Interlanguage…maps”, Dehghani, et al, 2017, p.6128
Neurology

9. Narratology
What is narrative?
Bruner (1986/2009) distinguishes between purely objective
facts on the one hand, and "narrative" forms of thought on the
other. But, Sarbine (1986) insists narrative mythic thought
informs even scientific paradigms. Narrative is hence the
sequenced telling of “motivations, goals, actions, events, and
outcomes”, and moreover, narratives “structure our
understanding of the world and of ourselves” (Lakoff, 2010,
p.21).

10. Elements of Fiction
Aristotle, in Poetics, a plot follows a rule of three, it has a
beginning, middle and end.
Georges Polti drawing from an earlier work by 18th Century
Italian play-write Carlo Gozzi, attempted to find all possible
dramatic situations in story: he arrived at 36.
W.H. Auden’s work on what he called hero quests convinced him
that genres as diverse as detective drama, adventure, Moby Dick,
or Kafka novels contain the same six stages.
Booker has analyzed stories into seven basic plots.

11. The ATU

12. Propp to Campbell

13. “The Swan-geese”, Propp, 1928/1968, p.99.

14. (Post-) structuralism
“The development…of the postmodern critical
approaches, particularly poststructuralism and
cultural materialism, has brought about a marked
devaluation of the theories of Eliade, Jung and
Campbell” (Gill, 2003, p.12).

15. “Structural model”, Lévi-Strauss, 1984, p.183.

16. “Two semiological systems”, Barthes, 1957/1991, p.113.

17. Fairytale
Part of a group of closely associated genres including world
folklore, myth, epic, saga, and legend.

18. Campbell … the difference between fairytale and myth as scale,
or “microcosm…macrocosm”.
J.R.R. Tolkien … fairytales are defined by their setting and stock
characters.
Max Lüthi ... minimal character development, black and white
contrasts, timeless objects, symbolism, repetition, often in threes,
and climactic dramas that resolve last-minute.
Mircea Eliade, a Fascist and Traditionalist ... remnants of
initiaton rites of ancient mystery religions…This was roughly also
Propp’s view.

19. Holm (2007). Retrieved from http://balkhandshambhala.blogspot.com/2012/12/shamis-en-balkh-proto-indo-iranian.html
Fairytale is specifically European folklore. Da Silva and Tehrani
(2016) put the story of the smith and the devil to a Proto-Indo-
European bronze age origin; other exceedingly ancient stories
include the kind and the unkind girls, and Jack and the beanstalk.

20. Retrieved from http://www.sarahmorseadams.com/fairy-tale-friday-the-white-cat-by-madame-daulnoy/

21. For the Nazis, European folktales were “considered to be holy or
sacred Aryan relics” (Zipes, 2012, p.141).
Retrieved from https://nirvadvd.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/heinrich-himmler-the-decent-one-2014-de-vanessa-lapa/

22. Psychology

23. “Drama Triangle”, Karpman, 1968, p.50.

24. Le Guernic (2004) has investigated the implications in
education. She renames Karpman’s drama positions to
archetypal roles that accentuate the positive, “the Helper or
the Donator”, “the Guide or the Mandator” and “the
Beneficiary” (p.220).

25. MAC
Retrieved from https://squareup.com/store/truthtarot/

26. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test

27. “Saga-55 story-telling cards”, Egetmeyer, n.d., retrieved
from https://oh-cards.com/media/fyler-en.pdf

28. Asian Storytelling Network. (n.d.). Services. Retrieved from
http://www.asianstorytellingnetwork.com/services.html

29. Martin, R. (n.d.). Tell a tale. Retrieved from
http://www.tellatale.eu

30. Storytelling in ELT
Lucarevschi (2016) reviews the literature on the effectiveness
of storytelling for English acquisition, finding that storytelling is
overall more effective across receptive and productive
skills, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation than
traditional methods like textbook based lessons.

31. This successfulness has been attributed to storytelling
lessons being “fun, engaging, and highly memorable”
(Lucarevschi, 2016, p.23), and “because they provide learners
with comprehensible input” (p.33).
Hsu’s (2010) research led her to speculate that not just
listening, but retelling as well, is part of what makes
storytelling effective in ELT. Atta-Alla (2012) saw improvement
doing something similar having students write their own
fairytales and then tell them.

32. Broome (2003) presents the interesting case of a high school
English program that was built around fairytales…. after a
time,“no longer are students protesting that fairy tales do not
have hidden themes” (p.24). The point arrives finally when
one student complains, ““Why did you do all this to me? Now I
can’t read a fairy tale without seeing all this stuff”” (Broome,
2003, p.25).

33. Seven presumed benefits of ELTMAC
Memory
L2 identity
Trans-cultural
Cultural competence
Category and corpus linguistics
Meaningfulness
Broad use

34. Memory
“Archetypal Symbol Inventory (ASI)”, Rosen, Smith,
Huston & Gonzalez, 1991, p.227.

35. Rosen, Smith, Huston & Gonzalez (1991) have demonstrated,
with native speakers of English, significantly improved memory.
Bradshaw & Storm (2013) get similar results with a set of 30
cards, and using a mixed multicultural Australian group.
Brown & Hannigan (2006) replicate results with bilingual
English-Spanish speakers, running the test in both English
and Spanish.
Sotirova-Kohli et al (2013) replicate the ASI test results with a
Swiss German speaking group.

36. Sotirova‐Kohli, Rosen, Smith, Henderson &Taki‐Reece (2011)
found an “8%” memory advantage in their test using traditional
Tensho style Chinese characters (p.125).

37. L2 identity
Narrative gives the “sense of
the whole” to our lives
(Flanagan, 1992, p.199), “it
plays the role of giving
organization, meaning, and
structure to a life” (p.189).

38. Trans-cultural
The archetypes of the collective unconscious are the
same “in any part of the world” (Jung, 1964/1988, p.69).

39. Cultural competence
Every culture/civilization has a
defining narrative at its
nucleus; for the West,
according to Oswald Spengler
(1937), that is Faust.

40. Category and corpus linguistics
Rosch (1978/1998) collected
research that problematized
Aristotle’s view of how cognition
organizes. For her,
contextualized “events” are the
basic unit from which objects
derive meaning as props (p.19).

41. Meaningfulness

42. In TESOL, commercial interests, social-political
forces, and political correctness have been altering
content, censoring what might offend (Smith, 2003).

43. Broad use
Characters and “places and things”, Wright, 1995, p.194&197.

44. Action Research
Medieval story cards, source unknown.

47. Game 2, High Flyers, Book J, 2016, p.71.

48. In fairytale, the Aristotelian distinction between agent and object,
is not clear-cut, in Disney’s Beauty and the beast (1991), the
candlestick Lumière, or the clock Cogsworth, are both characters
and props.

49. Scaffolded storytelling game, Trailblazers, Book 7, 2016, p.60.

50. 52,170,410,224,819,317,150,720,000 possible
permutations, i.e., sequences, of 15 cards from the
deck of 59 cards.

51. ELTMAC game board.

53. Compleat Lexical Tutor, Cobb, 2018, retrieved 15 April, 2018
from https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/comp/

54. While personally, Propp or Campbell’s spiritual kind of
approach was the greater inspiration, the (post-)
structuralist perspective, i.e., binaries, figures large too.
The ELTMAC deck contains the pairings:
day /night
male/female
fruit/flower
fire/water
newborn/grave
domesticated/wild
dog/cat and cat/mouse
tree/forest
one/many
commoner/noble

56. Empirical Research
“A research Idea that can support your claims about the utility
of cards with archetypal themes used in English acqusition
[sic] could be the following. Create two groups of English
learners. These should have identical background. Control for
all factors that could influence English learning, both groups
should be as similalr [sic] as possible in constitution…. Then
proceed with English teaching in both groups, use the cards
only in one of the groups and after the course is over compare
the results in both groups” (Milena Sotirova‐Kohli, Personal
communication, 2018).

57. The research was carried out at one of the largest private
English institutes in Indonesia; they have about 80 locations
across the archipelago, the particular campus about 1,000
enrollees.
All subjects were 8 to11 years old young learners, with upper
intermediate English, CEFR A2 by the institute’s level
placement test.

58. I collected control group data from 16 classes totaling 117
students. These groups were taught fairytale vocabulary and
elements of fiction by a semi-communicative method using
High Flyers, Book J (2016) textbook, and supporting
PowerPoint.
The test group consisted of five classes totaling 28 learners
and were taught to the same aims, but using ELTMAC decks
to play a story creation game and then oral retelling.

60. Writing task, High Flyers, Book J, 2016.

61. Writing rubric, High Flyers, Book J, 2016.

62. The average writing task score of the textbook and
PowerPoint taught control group came to 84.42%.
The average score for the test group classes who played
ELTMAC games instead was 89.57%,
A difference of 5.15%.
In a t test the p value for a two-tailed test is 0.037.
<0.05. Statistically significant, null hypothesis rejected.
Findings

63. To the action research question, the answer is that it is
possible to develop a narrative story card game for ELT
based on the archetypes and journey. The ELTMAC deck
is the result.
Conclusions

64. To the empirical research question whether an
archetype and journey based ELT card game could
benefit English language learning, the result is that
ELTMAC games significantly improved narrative writing
of upper intermediate young learner classes compared to
the textbook and PowerPoint taught classes.

65. Results presaged by:
Jungians researching memory with the ASI.
Teachers who had already brought fairytale and analytical
psychology into their classrooms.
Educators who have been promoting OH cards.
Martin (n.d.) who documented his use of OH cards in ELT.

66. Semetsky and Delpech‐Ramey (2012) implore
educators to further “explore the role of the unconscious
in learning” (p.69).

67. Developing English Language Teaching
Metaphorical Associative Cards
(ELTMAC)
Richard J. Stockton MA TESOL
richardstockton155@hotmail.com