Most stories are fairly flat in the first ten minutes. It takes time to build interest. When the right cute answers appear, things get more interesting.
I like to use this time as an exercise in trust. The mantra occuring every few minutes in my deeper mind is: “It doesn’t have to always be funny; they are learning the language.”
However, one can always bail. We can simply stop the story and go to retells. Besides normal retells, we can have someone draw the story on the board as the speaker retells. Or we could ask the class to try to retell it from the first person singular or plural forms. There are lots of options on retells.
One option is very clever and easy. I have a sign up in the back of my room that simply says, “How do you spell that” in L2. I just say the word I want them to spell, ask the question and/or point to the sign (the kids understand it because it is used so often). Then, the class as a group has to spell the word while I write each letter they say – separated by a dash – on the whiteboard. Takes a few seconds, I reset my circuits, and quickly return to the story.
An option I really like is to bring a new character. Today we had a big nose with a cold who went to a plumber to get it fixed. It went nowhere until the plumber sneezed and two snot babies came out and swam (in you can guess what) across the room to my AP’s toilet who flushed them end of story. The big nose was a bust but the snot babies were fun.
The best is not to stop the story. Hanging in the moment of fear that it isn’t working is something we all need to experience before we get to wear our TPRS merit badges.