Storytelling in Early Childhood English Learning

When we were little children, most of us loved reading or listening to our parents or friends to tell us some stories. Usually, adults pay attention to the world about themselves, but children will pay attention to the stories about our nature and all other themes.

This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Jessica W. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT.

There are many benefits for the teacher when using stories.

First, there are many excellent vocabularies in the stories. It will be better to teach the words in the stories than teach the world directly. Also, we need to choose the right level for the children. The story should have cultural significance and match our teaching aims.

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The stories can be used with any level and any age group.

So it is a very useful tool to improve vocabulary, sentence structure, and reading skills. When giving the stories to the children, they are accessible to many ages and all levels about English because the language has been simplified to match the students' English level. If we can choose the right story, the class can be very motivating. They are good for modeling writing styles. We can improve the students' four skills, reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. In the following article, we will have a look at how stories can improve young children’s four skills.

If we want to practice the reading skill.

We need to do the stories quietly otherwise it’s speaking and reading. We can choose some stories for the students to read, after the reading we need to check if they get the main idea of the stories.

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When we want to practice speaking skill.

We can choose some linking activities, like” how does this story finish? What happened next? In this activity, we can let the students try to use their ability to create the story. We can build a speaking environment for the students. We can also let the students do the role-play about the stories they have read. In this way they can put themselves in the story situation, our students will have the desire to speak because they participate in the activities.

Our students can make up their own stories in a similar style to the one they’ve heard or write to someone about the story they heard, telling them about it. When I had a part-time job teaching young students about writing. I tried to use the story to let them write down a story about the things that they wanted to see. I found they were interested in what we are doing, they wanted to finish the writing, usually, it is difficult for a young learner to do that. They can write just like they are the author of the work they are writing.

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From the story, we can also improve our teachers’ or students’ listening skills.

We can use audiobooks to practice this skill. When we use the audiobook, our students will pay much attention to what they are reading.

We can also use songs with the story, choose the gap-fill activities and if we choose the right ones for showing tense structures, stories are also excellent for punctuation practice and pronunciation activities. When we choose the stories we will think about how many new languages will be presented to the students, so the students will have a good master of the target languages.

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Our students will have more opportunities to extend the stories into other linking activities, such as discussions, book reviews, creating artwork. If their own experience is similar to the story, they can collect information about the story. So the story is very important for the children’s full development. So in the future, we can try to use the tool, to offer the best class for our young students.

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