Abstract
This paper discusses the development of a process to narrativize abstract content in the context of English taught as a foreign language, focusing on the teaching of grammar rules which are problematic for Italian learners. It argues that content in story-form is better processed by the human brain compared to non-narrative content, and highlights how the discussion on narrativization of abstract content is still open. Then it describes the challenges to the development of such process, explains a narrativization proposal, and illustrates its development, structure and application. Finally, it presents preliminary results of a first exploratory application in a school context, showing that the process is clear and direct enough to be applied successfully by secondary school students. This process could be the first step towards a new representation of abstract knowledge and the automated creation of metaphorical stories.
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Notes
- 1.
“Speaking English as a Foreign Language” in the definition of Paolo Balboni [1]: they study and practice English living in their home-country, Italy, or anyway in a non-English speaking country.
- 2.
To see the video of the story visit https://youtu.be/_PK86pWaEJY.
- 3.
To see this story, visit the link https://youtu.be/y5sF2wQywB8 .
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Acknowledgments
I would like to show my gratitude to Giuliana Dettori for her mentorship and help during the writing of this paper. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their precious insights. I am also grateful to Daniel Levin who took the time to correct the text.
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Zampolli, S. (2017). Verb+s Is Looking for Love: Towards a Meaningful Narrativization of Abstract Content. In: Nunes, N., Oakley, I., Nisi, V. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10690. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71027-3_11
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