We have been telling each other stories for thousands of years. It is one of the most fundamental traditions of humankind and an essential aspect of how we communicate. We make sense of the world around us through the deep connection we have with stories.
Stories teach us about our life and other people’s lives. They teach us about lives we may never have known of because of how distant they are from our own lives: geographically, socially, and culturally. That possibility makes working with stories an amazing way to develop understanding and respect for other cultures. That is why stories play an essential role in creating citizens of the world, people who are aware and respectful of our differences.
Stories promote empathy because they allow us to look at the lives of the characters and create a connection with identities that are so different from our own. More than that, stories make us aware that other ways of living exist, and this realisation can have a beneficial impact on children’s development. That is why telling stories is such an important way of teaching.
In her article Learning through literature, Janice Bland (2019) gives as a few reasons why we should include stories when teaching children: they offer contextualised access to authentic language and sensitise learners to different aspects of the language: grammar, lexis and formulaic sequences that will trigger implicit learning mechanisms characteristic of young learners.
One of the reasons why stories work when we teach children is because they know how stories work. Children naturally transfer their familiarity with stories from L1 to L2 and are usually willing to listen to and read stories in English, even when they can’t understand everything in the story.
Stories work on children’s innate curiosity and creative play. They promote imagination, creativity and develop children’s ability to communicate their thoughts and feelings, playing an important role in the development of children’s communicative skills. Stories are also a great tool to develop empathy. Through stories children can establish connections between their lives and the lives of other people, noticing similarities and differences, which contributes to the development of children’s critical thinking and their engagement in social action.
Children are able to understand what is said to them even before they understand individual words (Halliwell, 1992). They use other features of communication, such as intonation, gestures, and facial expressions to help them understand what the words and phrases they don’t understand mean. They understand the message and then they understand the language. So, when children get in contact with a new language at school, they use their message-interpreting skills to help them interpret the new sounds, new words and new structures.
Stories provide a natural, relevant, and enjoyable context for exposure to a language. They are an opportunity to familiarise children with the sounds, rhythm and intonation of English and a great way of exposing children to authentic language. Visuals, miming, gestures, and voice when telling a story help the discovery and construction of meaning. With stories, children develop learning strategies and thinking skills, such as predicting, hypothesising, guessing, and inferring meaning.
An important aspect of working with stories is how to select the right ones. Here are a few proposed criteria to select stories for children proposed by Carol Read (2007):
Content: The content of a story should be relevant, interesting, and memorable for children. This is what is going to make learners relate to the story. It’s important to know our students if we want to choose stories that spark their interests.
Visuals: If you are choosing a picture book, make sure it’s clear and attractive and that the visuals support children’s understanding of the story.
Language: Language in a story should be appropriate to the children it is intended for, which means that the level of language should match children’s language level. Even though stories are not necessarily used to explicitly teach language, they expose children to authentic language and children should be able to understand some of it to understand and react to the story.
For very young learners: discourse patterns that are repetitive or that include a rhythmic refrain promote participation, facilitate memory formation, and helps practise a particular language pattern.
Stories are useful when teaching young learners, and they expose children to grammar, vocabulary, and culture. But the most important thing about stories is that they should be enjoyable. Stories are always a moment of enjoyment, a moment when we enter a new world.
References
Bland, J., Learning through literature in Garton, S. & Copland, F. (2019) The Routledge
Handbook of Teaching English to Young learners, Routledge
Halliwell, S. (1992) Teaching English in the Primary Classroom, Longman
Read, C. (2007) 500 Activities for the Primary Classroom, Macmillan
