STORYTELLING
1. The role of stories in foreign language teaching
Children take pleasure in listening to stories in their mother tongue. As soon as they hear the formula “Once upon a time…” they know what to expect next, understanding the conventions of narrative. For this reason, “storybooks can provide an ideal introduction to the foreign language presented in a context that is familiar to the child. Stories can also be the starting point for a wide variety of related language and learning activities” (Brewster, Ellis and Girard, 1992: 186). The use of storytelling in foreign language teaching has greatly increased over the past few years. The materials and activities that derive from literary texts are a great aid to learning in that they appeal to the learners’ imagination, increase motivation and, above all, create a rich and meaningful context. Stories are seen as a first-rate resource in the teaching of the child’s own language.
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As Cameron claims “stories represent holistic approach to language teaching and learning that place a high premium on children’s involvement with rich, authentic uses of the foreign language” (2001: 159). They present a whole imaginary world, created by language, that children can enter and enjoy, learning language as they go. Stories bring into the classroom texts that originate in the world outside school (ibid. 2001). Storytelling engage children’s interest, motivation, attention and imagination and develop their language skills in a holistic way. They also appeal to children with different intelligences and learning styles and provide a framework for fostering social skills and attitudes, such as active listening, collaborating, turn taking and respect for others, in a positive way. Through stories children develop understanding of themselves and the world around them.
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Young children love listening to stories and older ones begin to read for themselves. Moreover, stories in contrast to pictures or even games are pure language. Ur claims that “telling a story in the foreign language is one of the simplest and richest sources of foreign language input for young learners. The most effective combination in teaching is pictures and stories together: and the success of use of picture books with young learners has been attested by many” (Ur, 1991: 289). Ellis and Brewster state that, “listening to stories is a shared social experience, it provokes a shared response of laughter, sadness, excitement and anticipation” (1991: 1). Scott and Ytreberg point out that “listening to stories should be part of growing up every child. Educationalists and psychologists shown that stories have a vital role to play in the child’s development of language”. The teacher’s role is very significant. They suggest that “teacher should create a friendly and secure atmosphere during listening to stories, establish a storytelling routine and rearrange the seating so that teacher have eye contact with pupils” (1990: 29). What is more, children should seat together and comfortably, if they are relaxed and comfortable they are more open to what they are about to hear, and they will benefit far more from the storytelling. Many stories are full of repetition in themselves. Almost all stories are worth telling again and again. (ibid 1990) According to Ellis and Brewster “stories exercise the imagination, children can become personally involved in a story as they identify with the characters and try to interpret the narrative and illustrations. Stories are a useful tool in linking fantasy and the imagination with the child’s real world, they provide a way of enabling children to make sense of their everyday life” (1991: 1). Halliwell claims that “children have the natural ability of grasping meaning by other sources such as intonation, facial expression and so on, no matter what language is used to present the story” (1992: 3). Furthermore, through stories children have wider knowledge of the world, providing contexts in which children can experience the world using their own imagination (Cameron, 2001). Taking into consideration that listening to the teacher reading stories in a classroom is a well established social experience, it is easy to see its potential in the EFL context. By controlling the flow of the story, by asking questions from time to time to engage children more in the stories, it is possible that the storytelling process can also make children more aware of how to communicate, how to listen and interpret, not necessarily only in words but also by their facial expressions and gestures, when people are telling a story, and how to collaborate in case of questions raised by teachers or classmates (Wright, 1995).

2. Reasons for using stories in foreign language teaching
Stories are frequently claimed to bring many benefits to young learner classrooms, including language development (Wright 1997; Garvie 1990 cited in Cameron, 2001). They are very important for children in learning their mother tongue as well as learning a foreign language. Stories give a chance to escape into a magic worlds where anything is possible. For children this is vital because fantasy plays such an important role in their lives. Stories are an essential motivating factor in young learners’ classes. Brewster, Ellis and Girard give a number of ways in which stories are valuable in language teaching.
They are motivating and fun and can help develop positive attitudes towards the foreign language and language learning. They can create a desire to continue learning. Imaginative experience helps develop their own creative powers. Listening to stories allows the teacher to introduce or review new vocabulary and sentence structures by exposing the children to language in varied, memorable and familiar context which will enrich their thinking and gradually enter their own speech. Listening to stories develops the child’s listening and concentrating skills via visual clues, for example pictures and illustrations, their prior knowledge of how language works, their general knowledge. This allow them to understand the overall meaning of a story and to relate it to their personal experience. Stories create opportunities for developing continuity in children’s learning since they can be chosen to consolidate learning in school subjects across the curriculum. Learning English through stories can lay the foundations for secondary school in terms of basis language functions and structures vocabulary and language learning skills (1992: 186-187).

What is more, “children enjoy listening to stories over and over again. This frequent repetition allows certain language items to be acquired while others are being overtly reinforced. Many stories contain natural repetition of key vocabulary and structures. This helps children to remember every detail, so they can gradually learn to anticipate what is about to happen next in the story. Repetition also encourages participation in the narrative” (Ellis and Brewster, 1991: 1-2). “Listening to stories helps children become aware of the rhythm, intonation and pronunciation of language”. In addition, stories “develop the different types of ‘intelligences’ that contribute to language learning, including emotional intelligence. Stories improve children’s learning strategies such as listening for general meaning, predicting, guessing meaning and hypothesizing. They allow children to play with ideas and feelings and to think about issues which are important and relevant to them. They also provide ideal opportunities for presenting cultural information and encouraging cross-cultural comparison. For teachers stories allow to use an acquisition-based methodology by providing optimal input” (Ellis and Brewster, 2002: 2). Cameron adds that stories have the potential to capture children’s interest and thus motivation to learn, along with space for language development. The five or ten minutes spent listening to a well-known story will re-activate vocabulary and grammatical patterns, and offer opportunities for children to notice aspects of the language use that passed them by on previous readings or that they have partly learnt (2001). Stories are universally recognized by children, as there are stories in the oral tradition of all languages. Children are used to hearing them and to their structure, so it is very easy for them to transfer their own experience of stories in their mother tongue to stories in different languages. They are full of associations and convey emotions. Through stories, children can be more familiar with the world around them and will develop an ability to transmit their personal emotions and reactions to different situations. Stories have a context which can be learned and recalled by children as a group. They lead to communication, as children are eager to know more about the story, so they will benefit from a great deal of natural practice in asking questions, making predictions and hypotheses about it and this helps their cognitive development. Storytelling helps teachers to introduce and reinforce a lot of vocabulary and grammatical patterns which would be hard to introduce in a different way.
Effective stories are repetitive and this fact makes them easily followed by children, who learn lots of new vocabulary and grammatical structures without realizing it. When focusing on language, teachers must make sure not to lose the magic of stories. Usually stories provide information about the culture of the countries they are originally from and we must take advantage of this. Through learning the language teachers can also learn something of the culture of the country where it is spoken. Stories are fun. Children enjoy them a lot, because they introduce funny characters and a great deal of fantasy which helps children let their imagination and creativity fly. Storytelling guarantees enthusiastic participation by children.
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3. Telling or reading aloud?
As Andrew Wright remarks there are advantages and disadvantages in both cases. Reading aloud lets teachers use story pictures to help conveying meaning, there is no need to learn stories by heart, teachers do not have to worry about making mistakes in the foreign language, children will always hear the same text (no variations of it), so this will help them to make predictions of what is to come. It demonstrates that books are a source of interesting ideas and thus encourages reading (1995). Reading is not the same as telling a story and in this case teacher should not change the story at all. “Children like to have their favourite stories repeated, and they will very often be able to tell the teacher the story word for word – they do not like changes being made” (Morgan and Rinvolucri, 1988: 9). If children like learning stories off by heart, teachers should let them. Children of all ages love to be read to, and teacher should try to spend as much time as possible reading to the eight to ten year olds as well as to the younger learners. For the older group it is often good to have a continuing story so that you read a bit of the book every time teacher see them (ibid, 1988). But it also has some disadvantages, for example, while reading a story teacher tend to go quickly and to concentrate on the reading rather than on the listeners! (Wright, 1995). Morgan and Rinvolucri add that “the reader is forced to become aware of things normally taken for granted, such as breathing; and these technical problems may become a barrier between him or her and the author just as the book he or she is holding may become a physical barrier between him or her and his or her audience” (1988: 8). On the other hand, “storytelling lets teachers make the story theirs, as they will never tell the story twice the same way (teachers can introduce variations, change the scenes, change the voices of the characters etc.)” (Wright, 1995: 10). They can see children faces, so they can check if they are understanding the story or if there is a lack of comprehension; they can avoid irrelevant information or add new details; they can use gestures and mime freely to help the understanding of the story; they can adapt the language and use words they know our students already know. However, storytelling implies that stories must be learnt by heart and some teachers feel reluctant to tell stories because they afraid of making mistakes in the foreign language, but through telling stories teachers can develop oral fluency (ibid. 1995). What is more, in telling, teachers can shape the story to one’s own needs, they can address one’s audience directly: they can make eye contact, expand or modify the form of one’s telling as the occasion demands, and in general establish and maintain a community of attention between teller and listener (Morgan and Rinvolucri, 1988). Scott and Ytreberg point out that “telling stories to children of all levels means that the teacher can adopt the language to their level, can go back and repeat, can put in all sorts of gestures and facial expressions and can keep eye contact most of the time” (1990: 30).

4. Tips for Storytelling
Wright suggests a number of tips for use by teachers when they tell stories, and the author considered these in conducting research: before the story the teacher can put some music on; in order to calm the pupils the teacher might write Story Time on the board, they can use a friendly puppet or wear a particular coat or hat, pupils can be asked to sit on the floor around their teacher; while telling story the teacher can make use of variety of the human voice which includes pitch, volume, rhythm, softness/harshness; the teacher should point to the illustrations and ask the learners to do so too; the teacher should pre-teach unknown words and phrases, pupils can be involved in repeating key vocabulary and phrases from the story; teachers should use facial expression, body movements which should be a little slower and bigger, miming and gesture to help learners understand the meaning of the story; teachers can move quickly or slowly, jerkily or smoothly, with grand gestures or, with minor movements of eyebrows; pauses can be inserted into the story to create tension and build anticipation in the learners; different characters should have different voices, as far as possible; the teacher should maintain eye contact with the learners and involve them ; the story should be repeated several times (1995). Moreover, the teacher has to make the content accessible to learners, construct activities that offer language learning opportunities and plan classroom work with clear language learning goals in mind (Cameron, 2001).

5. Choosing stories
In choosing stories teacher should consider children’s interest, age, their experience and their language level. Teacher should choose stories that have interesting or lovely characters to attract children’s attention, that have simple and interesting plot or a surprising ending so that children can remember them and enjoy them, and that the language in the stories will be more memorable. Teacher can adapt stories as they like. (Wright, 1995). Morgan and Rinvolucri state that stories should arouse pupils’ interest and entertain them. What is more, should be appropriate and engage the pupils within the first lines, the chosen story should be liked by the teacher and well understood by the learners. Moreover, story should offer a rich experience of language (1988). Using real stories is very important because they “add variety and provide a springboard for creating complete units of work that constitute mini-syllabuses and involve pupils personally, creatively and actively in an all-round whole curriculum approach. They thereby provide a novel alternative to the coursebook” (Ellis and Brewster, 2002: 2). If a story appeals to pupils, they will want to hear it again and again (Cameron, 2001).

6. Fairy tales
Traditional fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks are amazing stories for telling. They have a clear structure: beginning, middle and end. They start off with the setting – when and where. The story is told in episodes events which have consequences. One set of consequences leads to another event. There are goodies and baddies, and the goodies win. Most fairy tales have good story lines and the teacher can either tell traditional stories from teacher’s own country or tales from other countries. If the teacher is going to tell traditional stories, then it is best that the teacher goes through the story firs and write it down in sequence. For example, Litlle Red riding Hood: Setting: In a wood. Her grandmother’s cottage. Episodes: Little Red Riding Hood makes a lunch basket. She says goodbye to her mother. She skips and sings on the way. She meets a wolf. Etc. This will make it easier for the teacher to remember the story as he/she tells it. Traditional fairy tales can be read aloud as well if the teacher have a version which is simply enough (Scott and Ytreberg, 1990).
Bibliography

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Morgan, J. and Rinvolucri, M. 1988. Once Upon a Time: Using Stories in the Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press
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