STORYTELLING IN EFL

Programa de inglés para niños, PIN. Programa de inglés para jóvenes, PIJ. U. de Antioquia, 2011

 

WHY STORYTELLING IN EFL?

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

—Ursula K. Leguen

“Story is the vehicle we use to make sense of our lives in a world that often defies logic.”

—Jim Trelease

Storytelling is as old as humankind. We have told stories since the beginning of time or read them later. They are the narratives of life, spanning the centuries and connecting the generations, they are the vessels in which we carry our history and traditions, our values and lessons for living, our hopes and dreams. This ancient tradition is at the heart of the human experience and encompasses virtually every facet of human endeavor.

The educational value of using stories and the technique of storytelling has always been undisputed throughout the world. Now more and more English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers are using carefully selected stories from the world of literature because stories comply to the major objectives in most countries for foreign language teaching: linguistic, psychological, cognitive, social and cultural. EFL teachers use stories to supplement their core materials or to create self-contained units of work that constitute mini-syllabuses. In this way, a story provides the starting point and rich context for developing a wide variety of related language and learning activities involving students personally, creatively and actively in an all round whole curriculum approach (see Ellis and Brewster 1991 and 2002)

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/learning-english-through-childrens-literature