Ever since I’ve started teaching I relied heavily on stories for teaching language structures, vocabulary, values and many more. I strongly believe that using stories in language teaching has many benefits and it has a great impact on language learning. In order to include stories in your teaching, first you have to decide what topics you want to teach and then choose relevant children’s literature to match those topics. When I choose children’s literature for a certain topic, I try to look for easily accessible literature, I want to make sure the books have that ‘language component’ and that I can find extra materials to use with the story books, such as a colouring book, plush toys, games etc.
According to Harmer&Puchta (2018) stories motivate students, they create a special classroom atmosphere, they engage students emotionally but they also have an impact on how much students can remember from the lesson.
The following articles illustrate story-based syllabi for different stories I chose for a class of very young learners.
References
Harmer, J., Puchta, H., (2018) Story-based Language Teaching: The Resourceful Teacher Series, Helbling Verlag GmbH
englishthroughstories.org 