How Aesop and Jean de la Fontaine help us learn new languages.

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Anna-Olimpia Rosenblum has been writing her PhD with me, on a teaching tool she has developed, using animated retellings of Aesop’s fables to help language-learners with vocabulary acquisition. The animation is lovely: a simple retelling, with vocabulary interspersed, which takes learners through well known stories such as La Cigale et la Fourmi (The grasshopper and the ant), or Le Conseil Tenu par les Rats (The assembly of the rats). Working through a story, learning its meaning and message, in combination with illustration and voice recording, helps language-learners acquire new vocabulary. I’ve interviewed Anna-Olimpia, below, about this project, which I hope will only grow once she has completed the PhD. —Elizabeth Hale

You’re using well known fables to support language teaching.  How did you come to this idea?  What is it about fables that make them useful for learners? 

In my first year of secondary school, I recall participating in the Berthe Mouchette French poetry competition, where I recited La Cigale et la Fourmi, a French fable by Jean de La Fontaine (known in English as The Cricket and The Ant). In the French education system throughout the French speaking world, “la recitation” or poetry recital is highly emblematic of French teaching and is more than just an academic exercise; it is a means of cultural preservation, ensuring that literary traditions are passed down and remain relevant. 

My exposure to poetry recitation not only strengthened my linguistic skills but also deepened my appreciation for French culture and sparked a passion for second language education, leading me to pursue further studies in this field.  

Fables played a pivotal role in my early language education, offering rich storytelling that made vocabulary acquisition contextual, engaging, and memorable through repetition, dialogue, and vivid imagery. The moral lessons in fables provide deeper cultural insights, making language learning more than just memorising words, it becomes an exploration of values, traditions, and human nature.  

In developing your digital learning tool, you’re bringing together fables, animation, and education.  How did you come to this idea?  What have you found in doing this? 

Through the recitation of a fable in the French language as a junior secondary student, my teacher taught cultural values, allegorical meanings, and the moral lessons embedded in the genre. I learnt about French history at the time the fable was written and the importance of “saving for a rainy day” through the tale of a cricket who was too flippant during the summer months, singing and basking in the sun, only to run out of food while the industrious ant incessantly worked to guarantee supplies for the cold season. My linguistic skills were deepened while gaining insight into the societal context of the story. This immersive experience of language learning transformed into a deep appreciation for cultural empathy.  

My experiences as a language teacher revealed gaps in traditional language teaching methods, particularly in how they fail to engage students in a way that feels natural and immersive. Recognising that modern students are accustomed to digital and visual media, I sought to bridge traditional storytelling with contemporary learning technologies. This ultimately led to the development of the Visual Language Learning (VLL) tool as an innovative approach to enhance vocabulary acquisition and cultural appreciation in language education. Through both my experience as a learner and my subsequent work as a teacher–researcher, I have found that fables offer a uniquely powerful conduit for language learning. Their brevity, narrative clarity, and moral focus create an accessible structure that supports comprehension even at lower proficiency levels, while their metaphorical depth invites repeated engagement and deeper interpretation. Fables naturally embed high-frequency vocabulary within meaningful contexts, enabling learners to infer meaning rather than rely on decontextualised memorisation. They also provide an immediate cultural entry point: each story reflects the values, humour, and social norms of the time and place in which it was written. In classroom practice, I have observed that fables sustain attention, lower anxiety, and prompt richer discussion compared with more conventional textbook passages. Most importantly, fables create a space where language, culture, and imagination intersect, allowing learners to develop linguistic competence alongside cultural empathy. These findings underpin my decision to place fables at the centre of the VLL tool and demonstrate how this genre continues to offer pedagogically rich, multimodal opportunities for vocabulary development and cultural understanding. 

Which fables have you worked with so far?  Why did you choose these particular ones?  What aspects of language did they help develop?   

The participants in my research study were Italian and French students so the focus was on using fables by Jean de La Fontaine. I chose the well-known  « La Cigale et la Fourmi » (The Cricket and the Ant) and also « Le Conseil Tenu par les Rats» (The Assembly of the Rats) which were selected for several reasons.   

Poetry and fables are powerful vectors of a language’s culture. They convey values, traditions, beliefs, and specific historical contexts that help learners understand not only the language but also the cultural framework in which they are inscribed. Fables are often moralistic and allegorical, recounting universal life lessons while shining a light on specific cultural aspects.  

La Fontaine holds a prominent place in French-speaking culture for his enduring fables, which provide sharp satirical critiques of human folly, targeting figures such as court officials, the Church, and the rising bourgeoisie. The layered meanings of his parables allow for varied interpretations across ages, granting them lasting literary and pedagogical value. For example, “La Cigale et la Fourmi” means that if one works diligently, one is always prepared to face problems, contrary to continually lazing around, which ultimately gets you nowhere. Through repetition, rhyme, narration, and dialogue, poetry and fables expose learners to a variety of vocabulary and complex grammatical structures in a contextual and memorable manner. The fables I used in my study employ modal verbs as well as a good selection of high frequency adjectives. 

The positive and negative aspects of the world in which the participants live are reflected in these inferences that illustrate the personal connections that learners made to events and experiences, enhancing their understanding of language and cultural references, aligning with Lawrence and Paige’s (2016) call for narrative practices that transmit cultural knowledge and build empathy.  

Another Jean de la Fontaine (1668/2011) fable used in the research, “Le Conseil Tenu par les Rats” (“The Assembly of the Rats”), tells how a parliament of rats boldly plans to attacher le grelot (hang a bell) around the cat’s neck so they can hear the predator coming, until every delegate flatly refuses to take on the dangerous job. The fable evokes political satire and civic courage through its criticism of politicians who propose bold reforms yet avoid personal risk. Through the fable, students are able to gain insight into the historical roots of French scepticism towards empty oratory. Moreover, through fables, students can discuss how 17th-century texts mask modern social issues, such as climate action and strike participation. In French schools, this fable is often used to teach the concept of prise de risque (taking initiative) through the vocabulary of le rat qui a attaché le grelot (the rat who attached the bell).  

What will you work on next? 

In a world where artificial intelligence threatens the very existence of language education, there is comfort in remembering that culture and communication are born from the heart—and it is there that their true power will always reside. Through my participation in education, the preservation of literary and cultural traditions has remained faithful, ensuring that the essence of human connection and cultural identity continues to thrive, and through technological advancements, the creation of a digital library of stories developed with the VLL tool could be made accessible to all language learners. These personal episodes also foreshadow interstitial immersion, the short culture-grounded bursts of viewing that power the progressive immersion hypothesis (PIH) which emerged from my study.  

When a quarter of the world’s language families have already vanished and another 90% stare down the barrel of extinction, we cannot keep starving languages of time, creativity, or hope. We must let learners acquire words the way they first learned to speak, by seeing, hearing, and feeling stories. There are countless myths and fables, rich in cultural depth, waiting to be reimagined in an accessible and captivating way. They have the potential to ignite the imaginations of young language learners, offering them a chance to explore a genre they might never encounter otherwise—and inspire a lifelong appreciation for the beauty of language through storytelling. 

Post-thesis, I am researching how AI could provide technological input into the VLL tool, and I have recently connected with an educational AI developer who creates educational scripted Avatars. Together, we are developing a prototype Avatar that delivers short, guided conversations reinforcing the vocabulary and narrative content of each VLL fable. It can engage with learners in conversation about a multimodal fable after they view it, or guide a vocabulary review using the target words from the animation. That kind of integration could offer a valuable next step from receptive to productive language use. The Avatar functions as an interactive companion, prompting learners with level-appropriate questions and modelling target-language use. This work extends my research by operationalising the Progressive Immersion Hypothesis, creating structured micro-interactions that bridge the gap between formal lessons and ongoing exposure. It translates the VLL tool’s multimedia comprehensible input into an interactive format that promotes active use of new vocabulary. This expansion strengthens the model of interstitial immersion by providing a scalable, data-rich environment for guided practice. Ultimately, the Avatar deepens the pedagogical impact of the VLL tool while addressing the broader problem of declining senior language enrolments.  

I am hoping to provide access to multimodal fables via a digital library and over time, the digital library becomes a multilingual treasure of endangered stories and emerging voices, freely preserving cultural heritage and accomplishing the VLL tool’s objective of providing every learner with stories that sustain language and culture for future generations.   

—Anna-Olimpia Rosenblum

References: 

de la Fontaine, J. (2011). Les fables de la Fontaine: Intégrale (new ed., J.-N. Rochut, Illus.) [The complete fables of La Fontaine]. Auzou. (Original work published 1668)  

Lawrence, R., & Paige, D. (2016). What our ancestors knew: Teaching and learning through storytelling. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 149, 63–72. https://doi.org/10.1002/ace.20177  

Rediscovering Scarab of Ra

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A chance conversation at work led me to rediscover an favourite game: Scarab of Ra (1987), written by Rick Holzgrafe, and published by Semicolon Games. Simple but devious, this game takes you into a a labyrinthine pyramid, to seek your fortune as an archaeologist. You start at the top of the pyramid, and work your way down, finding keys, treasure, food along the way. You cannot move onto the next level until you have found the key to the door. If you are lucky, you find lots of food, medicine, and treasure. If you are unlucky, you are more than likely to be attacked by cobras, monkeys, lions, mummies, and poison darts.

The door creaks open . . . and slams shut after you pass through… to find the Crown of Ra

My siblings and I were besotted by this game, along with other favourites such as the action game Crystal Raider, platform game Lode Runner, and the really weird tarot-based puzzle game The Fool’s Errand. All of them in black and white on our father’s Macintosh 128K (don’t quote me on that), all of them absorbing. The computer, of course, was meant to be helping our father write his books. But somehow these games found their way onto it, and one by one we’d slip off from whatever we were supposed to be doing, and would click away until recalled to the real world.

Throw your scarab at the mummy, or you’re in deep trouble.

The premise of Scarab of Ra was that you were invited along to help an Indiana-Jones-like archaeologist (‘Mississippi Smith’) on a treasure-seeking expedition. Each level had a longer and more complicated map to work your way through. If you dropped your lantern, or the monkey stole it, the scene would be shaded in grey tones, and you could not see as far. If you fell into a water trap, your map would be useless. You had to remember to eat. If you were bitten by a cobra, you might find some snake-bite potion that might help you, but the poison’s effects would still linger. The mummies and the lions were genuinely frightening–appearing as if from nowhere, and I remember jumping with shock when they’d show up.

Somehow the monkeys were the worst….

Your key treasures were the Staff of Ra, the Crown of Ra, and the Scarab of Ra. You could throw the Scarab at the mummies, if you saw them in time, or weren’t so caught up in your clicking that you’d miss your chance. If the monkey stole your Scarab, you had nothing to throw at the mummies, and your doom was sealed. If you got all three of your treasures, you could leave the pyramid, whereupon you would learn your status.

This is the bit that came to mind when we were talking about old games at work, and speculating about the dark academia asthetic (that romanticizes old academic tropes–treasure-seeking, old documents, grubbing among antiquities). In Scarab of Ra, depending on when you exited the pyramid with your treasure, you might be rewarded with status: undergraduate, honours graduate, post-graduate, teaching assistant, tenured professor, popular author of books about the ancient world, star of your own archaeological television show. (Only once did I ever reach that last pinnacle.) Dry academic humour added just that little bit of piquancy to Scarab of Ra. To this day I wonder how many archaeologists ardently desire their own tv series.

To my delight Scarab of Ra is available on the apple store. I’ve installed it on my ipad, and I look forward to fighting my siblings for turns, next time we’re all together.

–Elizabeth Hale

Uncle Scrooge goes to Atlantis with DuckTales and Little Golden Books.

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Last week I dropped into my favourite new Dunedin op-shop, the Re-Store, which is a charity shop operated by Habitat for Humanity. Lovely layout, great stuff, and a rich trove of children’s books, including Muppet Manners (or the Night Gonzo Gave a Party), and We Like Kindergarten. But the one that really caught my classicizing eye was The Secret City Under the Sea, a Little Golden Book featuring Scrooge McDuck travelling to Atlantis in a submarine. 

Scrooge is a favourite of mine since childhood.  There were excellent school fairs when I was a kid, where you could get huge bundles of comics very cheaply.  I remember poring over Look and Learn, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Battle of the Planets. The bundles were often quite random, and there was no guarantee you would read the whole of your favourite story, but that didn’t bother me.  It was a window into a different world—bright, weird, visual, full of adventure and fantasy.  British, American, Japanese—stories mainly for boys, but nevertheless appealing.

And Scrooge featured in these bundles, in the Uncle Scrooge series.  Travelling around the world and through time with his great-nephews Huey, Duey and Louie, often in quest for his missing ‘number one dime.’  His arch-nemesis was the villainous Magica deSpell, whom he never quite managed to outwit fully, and who always survived to annoy Scrooge another day. 

I didn’t know that these stories would be considered classics of the comics world, written and drawn by Carl Barks, and would become collectors’ items.  Barks, known as ‘good duck’ by fans, who identify him as their favourite contributor to the series, became a mastermind of the series.

On to 2025, and I stumbled on this blast from my past in the form of a Little Golden Book version.  Little Golden Books are a huge series of children’s books, mostly picture books, developed to make reading affordable.  They have hardboard covers, and recognisable patterned gilt spines, and they are often vibrantly illustrated, by significant illustrators.  So vibrantly illustrated in fact, that one designer has made a jewel-bright dress of them, turning the pages into a flowing skirt and the spines into a golden bodice. 

But back to Scrooge, who would likely rip the gold out of a LGB spine and add it to his collection, so powerful is his need for greed.  In The Secret City Under the Sea, Scrooge and his nephews learn that a golden coin with ‘Atlantis 1888 AS’ has been found on a nearby beach.  Deciding that AS means ‘after sinking,’ they commission Scrooge’s inventor friend Gyro Gearloose to make a submarine, and they head to the bottom of the ocean where they track down Atlantis.  All this happens in an afternoon, and while there, they set right a political problem in Atlantis, restoring the original king ‘King Gladone’ to the throne, which has been usurped by the wrong-headed King Lod.  Then they head home.  Scrooge doesn’t gain any gold from the experience, but they, and the reader, have learned a bit about Atlantis. 

Serial fiction like the Uncle Scrooge adventures requires writers to take their protagonists on many adventures in many locations.  So it is not surprising that Atlantis features in this series.  What is more surprising is that it features quite early in the Scrooge oeuvre.  The original 1954 comic version of the story, The Secret of Atlantis, was published in the 5th issue of Uncle Scrooge.  The story, which is 32 pages long, is naturally more complex than the Little Golden Book version.  Scrooge, his nephews, and also Donald Duck, explore the city and discover how it works (it is lit by luminous fish, for instance, and gets lighter the lower one goes).  Our Little Golden Book keeps things very simple: so simple that almost no plot remains. 

But what does remain is the idea of Atlantis: a magical city that sank beneath the sea, a city legendary for its wealth and beauty, a lost civilisation that only the bravest or cleverest (or richest, in the case of Scrooge) may find.  So the child who comes across this book may learn a little something about Atlantis, even if it is only the name and its associations.  That’s the strength of the Little Golden Book series: the simple connection to strong ideas. And it may be why Little Golden Books are still going, though these days they chase different treasures, such as biographies of superstars Taylor Swift, Le Bron James, Martha Stewart and Lionel Messi, golden figures of today who inspire admiration and emulation among young readers, to the point that they too don’t seem quite real–and like Atlantis (but without sinking beneath the waves), have a golden shimmer about them.

—Elizabeth Hale

Lego and the Mummy Queen: a visit to the Otago Museum

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On a whim this weekend, I visited the Otago Museum to see the travelling Relics: A New World Rises exhibition. The theme of Relics is civilisations old and new: the year is 2530; human civilisation has collapsed, and a new, LEGO, world has arisen, built inside the tattered relics of the past. A piano, an ATM, a trash-skip, a jet-ski: all are hosts for LEGO civilisations, built in the holes and corners of battered survivors from a previous age.

Relics was devised by Jackson Harvey and Alex Towlers, LEGO experts who won the 2020 reality-tv competion LEGO Masters on Australia’s Channel 9 TV. I watched that season, fascinated by the competitors’ creativity. At the time I was working on my book about children’s culture and classical mythology, and thinking hard about how contemporary play and creativity work in presenting ideas about the classical past. Previous winners had made a splendid model of Poseidon, and I wondered if other classical elements might appear. To be honest, I can’t remember if they did, but it was fun.

I was on the alert as I wandered round Relics, enjoying seeing small coloured-brick civilisations springing up inside Jackson and Alex’s chosen objects. Nothing classical appeared at first–not inside a fridge converted into a cryogenics lab, or a Volkswagen Beetle being repurposed by a small army of Lego minifigure engineers. But then I came to a stack of televisions, arranged to form ‘Cathode Studios,’ a tv station with different sets inside tvs of different shapes and sizes.

Here they were, the classical delights, in the form of a story inspired by archaeological adventures in Egypt. The story–the adventures of Indiana Bones, an archaeologist minifigure, in The Mummy Queen IV: the Matriarch’s Revenge. Small clips of the film were played on other screens, in rotation with science fiction adventures.

Delightful, and so too were other quasi-classical elements, such as the Atlantis-like scene in a book-case, where small civilisations inspired by books popped up.

The logic of the whole exhibition was delightfully thorough–each item inspires its own focused civilisation. An ATM holds a world devoted to money; a jet-ski holds a coastal pleasure-city; a piano hosts a street full of theatres.

What struck me about this exhibit was the idea of civilisation–that in presenting multitudes of different worlds, each distinct and separate, each held in a different container, Jackson and Alex provide a succinct commentary on our own multiple worlds in worlds–worlds for fun, for work, for living, for building, for adventuring, imagination, entertainment and sport. Lacking was a sense of a through-line narrative, but that is probably not the point of Relics. And while I wondered if there might have been a narrative threaded more consistently through the array, I noticed many groups and families enjoy working their way through the scavenger-hunt given out on entry.

We finished our tour through Relics by making structures of our own from the bins of LEGO bricks provided. As I put my wonky structure on a shelf, I noticed a man calmly dismantling pieces put together by previous visitors. He was the man who’d taken our entry fees, and equally calmly stamped our hands with the word ‘RELICS.’ For the rest of the day, I wondered if I myself was a relic–an object from a time past, struggling with a future world whizzing past. For an exhibition to have such an effect on one’s personal time-space-continuum is success indeed.

Elizabeth Hale

Jigsaw Odyssey–piece by piece

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I’ve recently gone back to jigsaw-land, following a fascination with the world of jigsaw competitions. I have no ambitions to do a 500-piece jigsaw in under 30 minutes. I do, however, enjoy the meditative aspects of piecing together an image, bit by bit, taking time to look at the colours and shapes presented, chatting with others in person, or on the phone. It’s an example of slow-looking, of the kind Jane Doonan describes in her wonderful book Looking at Pictures in Picture Books and it’s fun observing the thoughts this process brings out.

Especially since I’ve been doing a new jigsaw, made by Classicist Daisy Dunn in collaboration with illustrating team Good Wives and Warriors, a creative duo who have produced a number of interesting works with classical or mythological themes. It’s called The Odyssey in 1000 Pieces, and is a composite design that highlights key episodes in Homer’s Odyssey. A foldout handbook accompanies the jigsaw, explaining the episodes’ significance. As you do the jigsaw, you can learn new things about the Odyssey, or reconfirm your knowledge.

For myself, doing this jigsaw brings me back to the key elements of the Odyssey, and also familiarises me with less well known aspects (or ones I’ve forgotten). It’s interesting to see which elements are given prominence, and to think about why. The design is somewhat oblique, in that symbolic elements such as lyres, rays of sunshine, or vase art require a bit of thinking about. Then there’s the jigsaw factor, by which one focuses on particular elements according to colour, shape, definition.

I’m only starting this jigsaw. After I completed the edges, I started working by shape and colour. I found myself focusing on the whirlpool and rock of Scylla and Charybdis. Figures of danger and chaos, symbolic of being caught in impossible situations, or facing a choice between two equally unpleasant options, they threaten Odysseus and his sailors on their journey home to Ithaka from Troy. As I put the whirlpool together, I found myself reflecting on the whirlpool of work that I’ve lately been dealing with–end of year marking, setting up for a new trimester, doing my own bits of research along the way. I also thought about the whirlpools of tension and conflict (big and small) that affect us all from time to time.

Odysseus survives the danger by working out how to negotiate the dangers, getting through as unscathed as possible. That he and his crew don’t get through entirely unscathed is the point: you can’t avoid peril entirely.

That section of the jigsaw took up about 30 pieces in all. And as it neared completion, my attention started to drift to other sections. Calypso in her bower; Polyphemus with his sheep; the Sirens. I started to think about each item as engaging with different emotions–Odysseus’s journey as an emotional journey, in which the desire to achieve a goal (to get home to Ithaka) is muted, or waylaid, by distracting emotions. So the desire to have fun with the lotos eaters, or to seek comfort with Calypso, or to face one’s fears (Polyphemus, or the trip to the Underworld) or to be determined to avoid distractions (the Sirens), come into play. The Odyssey is an emotional workout, in which each challenge or delay connects with a different aspect of our feelings–our loves, our fears, our strengths or weaknesses.

In academia we are encouraged continually to provide ‘new’ knowledge, and so what one writes is often best by the concern that others have noticed something before. But sometimes reading, or playing, or doing jigsaws, brings out ideas that are true, and benefit from repetition. The idea of the Odyssey as a journey through the emotional spectrum–in this brightly coloured, vivid representation, is something to think about further. It certainly explains the appeal of the story, its connection to generations of listeners, readers, artists and storytellers. And it explains something for me as an individual–why each element of the story is so distinctive and thought-provoking.

With thoughts like these, it is small wonder I will not be entering the international jigsaw competitions any time soon.

Elizabeth Hale