Fairy tale rhetoric and language teaching

I. Input materials

1.1. Rhetoric strategy

Studies of effective performance strategies to promote active learning makes it necessary to focus on purposeful modeling of the language resources in teaching English to school students. We must admit, however, that school students should be involved in special activities which further foster their imagination and emotional involvement in classroom activities.

Fairy tales with their rich arsenal of expressive linguistic devices should be widely used for teaching effective speech communication and as an indispensable aid in terms of developing students rhetoric techniques. The imagery effect of tales is gained through the dynamics of textual contrasts, modality and emotions. Tales all round the world have certain similarities in their structure. They usually begin and end with specific formulas. Originally fairy tales existed in oral forms.

Nowadays when many of them are published the forms of presentation are various. They can be read, told and even dramatized. We should point out, that a fairy tale has a specific manner of oral presentation, different from any other sort of text.

Ultimately, tales are the most popular children’s stories. What makes them be utterly sufficient for the opening phase of teaching English is their non-hierarchical syntax (coordination rather than subordination), short sentences or clauses, simple vocabulary, repetition rather than use of synonyms and ideally conversation. The audience of young learners like all sorts of repetition as a means of anticipation in the text dynamics which makes their performance natural and interactive.

1.2. Invariant phonostylistic peculiarities

The narrative part

P itch patterns (tunes)	(pre-head) + Gradually Descending Head + Fall with the initial Rise (high)
	Falling Head + Fall-Rise (mid level) + (tail)
	(high irregular pre-head) + Rising (Climbing) Head +Fall with the initial Rise
	(pre-head) + Descending Broken Head + Fall incomplete Low level + Fall with the initial Rise (high level)
	High (one-peak) Head + level-Rise
	(pre-head) + Descending Sliding Head + Fall-Rise (undivided)
	(pre-head) + Descending Sliding Head + Fall with the initial Rise (high level)
Rhythm –	relatively isochronous; the number of stressed and unstressed words varies from two to four in most cases;
Rate (tempo) –	mostly normal; splashes of acceleration at times
Pauses –	normally made at syntactic juncture within and between sentences; brief, unit, double, treble pauses delimit various fragments of the message;
Loudness (voice volume)	normal (or slightly increased), constant;

The dialogical part

P itch patterns (tunes)	(pre-head) + Fall with the initial Rise + Fall with the initial Rise + Fall-Rise
	Falling Head + Fall with the initial Rise (emphatic)
	(high irregular pre-head) + Rising Head + Fall with the initial Rise (high level)
	(high irregular pre-head) + Descending Sliding Head + Rise-Fall
	(high irregular pre-head) + Heterogeneous Head + Fall with the initial Rise (emphatic)
	(pre-head) + Climbing Head + Fall with the initial Rise (high level emphatic)
	Fall + Rise (emphatic)
	Fall + Fall-Rise + (tail)
	High (narrow) Rise
	(pre-head) + High (wide) Rise
	(high irregular pre-head +Ascending Stepping Head + Fall complete with the initial Rise)
Rhythm –	deliberately strict rhythm serves as a means of action dynamism; the number of stressed words varies from one to three
Rate (tempo) –	very changeable, as flexible as the presenter wishes it to be;
Pauses –	mark proper delimitation of the message into semantic blocks; brief, unit, double pauses are observed;
Loudness (voice volume) –	very varied