10 Tiny Stories: A Simple, Effective Way to Get Beginner ESL Students Speaking

Tiny stories are a simple way to give A1-A2 learners something real to say. As language teachers, we know very well that one of the most difficult things is to find engaging, meaningful and real-life practice material for lower level classes. While planning a speaking lesson for my students, I thought about the following idea.

At A1-A2 levels, we ask learners to produce language, but we don’t always give them a reason to.

That’s the gap I keep coming back to with beginner and elementary levels. So much of the practice at this stage is drill-shaped, or built around things nobody would ever actually say, like how many cups are on the shelf, or whether there’s a cat in the garden. Technically it’s practice, and a necessary one, but it just isn’t practice of anything a person would reach for outside the classroom. If we want our learners to have a reason to speak or write, I think we need to give them something with a little life in it first, even at the lowest levels. That’s where stories come in, and I’ll call the ones I’ll explain here “tiny stories.”

The idea was to help them speak, but then I thought: instead of asking them to speak in just one lesson, I could turn this into a habit-forming activity. So I adjusted my initial plan as follows.

What I mean by “tiny stories”

Nothing complicated, just three or four sentences, with a small shift somewhere in the middle. Something like:

“Yesterday she missed her train. At first she was angry. Then she found a lovely café near the station.”

That’s it. But notice what’s already there: a situation, a feeling, a change of feeling, and a reason for the change.

How I’d use them in class

Give students the tiny story and let them read it. Then follow it with two or three questions that would help them expand the story.

• What did she have in the café?
• How did she feel?

So the story would evolve something like this:

“Yesterday she missed her train. At first she was angry. Then she found a lovely café near the station. She sat and had a cup of hot chocolate. It was tasty and she felt happy.”

You can also add more questions:

• Who did she meet there, if anyone?
• What did she do after the café?
• Did she still catch a train that day?
• What time did she finally get home?
• Did anything else surprise her that day?

Once they finish their stories, continue with a follow-up. Put students in groups and ask them to compare their stories. How did the story change? How similar or different are they? Alternatively, you may distribute colourful paper, ask your students to write their stories on it, hang them on the walls, and arrange a gallery walk where students choose the ones they liked the most and explain why.

How else can tiny stories be used?

Actually, speaking practice was my initial plan all along, I just needed a way to build up to it. You can think of the writing exercise as the first phase, and once students get used to the idea, you can use tiny stories as speaking practice.

You can write tiny stories on slips of paper and fold them. Ask your students to choose one, read it, and expand it.

I think this practice will be a good scaffold for them. They will feel more confident while speaking.

A few tiny stories to try

A1

• I have a small dog. His name is Max. Yesterday he ran into the garden. He…
• On Saturday I went to the market. I wanted apples, but there were none. I…
• My sister has a new bike. Yesterday she rode it to school for the first time. She…
• It was raining this morning, so I couldn’t walk to work. I…
• I made a cake for my friend’s birthday. When I opened the oven, I…
• We went to the park yesterday. There were a lot of children playing. My little brother…

A2

• Last week my phone stopped working. I was really worried because all my photos were on it. I…
• My neighbour always plays loud music at night. Last night I finally knocked on his door to complain. He was very surprised…
• I booked a table at a new restaurant for my anniversary. When we arrived, the restaurant…
• My best friend moved to another city last month. Yesterday she called me and said…
• I lost my keys on the way home from work. After an hour of searching, I…
• I decided to learn a new hobby this year. On my first lesson, something unexpected happened…

The takeaway

Tiny stories work because none of them are complicated, and maybe that’s the point. A tiny story gives learners vocabulary, grammar, reading, and inference practice all at once, but the thing that actually gets them talking is the feeling that the story is about someone, and that someone is a little bit like them. I’ll be adding a fuller set of tiny stories, sorted by level, in a follow-up post soon.

If this is useful, you might also enjoy my earlier posts:

“Junk” by Paul McCartney: What a Song About Nothing Can Teach About Everything

5 Creative Writing Activity Ideas: Walking Down the Street

A Letter to the Future