MIRON ELENA DANIELA THE IMPORTANCE OF STORIES IN TEACHING VOCABULARY Editura Scriitorilor 2026 1 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………….. 2 I. TEACHING VOCABULARY TO STUDENTS ……………..……………………… 5 1.1. Teaching English to students …………………………………………………….. 5 1.2. The importance of teaching vocabulary …………………………………….. 7 1.2.1. Strategies for vocabulary learning …………………………………….. 9 1.2.2. The minimum adequate vocabulary …………………………………….. 11 1.2.3. Young learners and their characteristics …………………………….. 12 1.2.4. Teaching vocabulary to young learners …………………………….. 15 1.2.5. How to teach vocabulary …………………………………………….. 16 II. USING STORIES TO TEACH ENGLISH VOCABULARY …………………….. 20 2.1. Reasons for using stories in teaching vocabulary to primary school students 20 2.2. Criteria for selecting the storybooks …………………………………………….. 22 2.3. Ways of using stories in English classes …………………………………….. 24 2.4. How do stories work in Communication? …………………………………….. 26 2.5. The five levels of stories …………………………………………………….. 28 2.6. Storytelling and listening activities …………………………………………….. 29 2.7. Challenges and difficulties in using storytelling in the classroom …………….. 35 2.8. The importance of storytelling in teaching vocabulary to young learners …….. 37 2.9. Story-based activities …………………………………………………………….. 39 2.9.1. Story Telling Grid …………………………………………………….. 39 2.9.2. Finish the Story Game …………………………………………….. 41 2.9.3. A Story Treasure Hunt …………………………………………….. 43 2.9.4. Role-play activities …………………………………………………….. 46 2.9.5. Word web activities …………………………………………………….. 49 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………………... 50 2 INTRODUCTION Learning a foreign language today is viewed from a different perspective than it used to be viewed hundred years ago. Nowadays, knowing a foreign language is closely connected to the evolution of society itself. A hundred years ago, people needed to speak foreign languages for educational purposes to decrypt their literature in the original to have a profound understanding of it, or for social purposes, or traveling reasons. Today the situation has changed due to “globalization”. We cannot function efficiently without thorough computer Knowledge and of at least a foreign language. Due to this new role of foreign language skills in human society, educators have struggled to discover and implement new teaching methods to offer a prompt response to the students‟ needs. The learners‟ main purpose today is to be able to communicate in the target language. To develop these communicative competencies, educators have to understand the complex nature of communication. According to C. Richards 1 (1986), communication is based on meaning, on social and cultural conventions. It urges the speaker to adapt his utterance in terms of stylistic level, word choice, and grammatical complexity to the social environment where the communication takes place. Communication involves interaction and cooperation with the interlocutor and a proper adaptation of the discourse structure. The next step is that of finding the most suitable methods and teaching techniques to meet the requirements of proper communication and to develop communicative competencies following the age of the learners. And it is widely acknowledged that learning a foreign language has a better rate of success when taught to very young learners. This happens due to the unique ability of young children to acquire a second language easily and with far less effort than adult learners. Therefore, educators also have to keep in mind that the methods used to teach adults don‟t apply to young learners. Children find it extremely difficult to stay still and concentrate for a long time and their mood tends to change very often. Nevertheless, they are curious and with a wide and vivid imagination and can show greater motivation in learning a foreign language, than most adults do. To succeed, the teachers have to be very inspired and inventive in selecting a 1 Richards, J.C. & Rogers, Th. S., Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 3 variety of interesting materials to keep them focused such as stories, cartoons, realia, flashcards, songs, games, toys, puppets. Over the years, there were several approaches to teaching a second or foreign language that went hand in hand with the changes in the face of society, the pedagogical concepts of the time, and the students‟ profile. For a considerable period, the focus on grammar was the main concern in language teaching, a situation that happened during the grammar-translation approach. Then the audio-lingual approach strongly emphasized the acquisition of the basic grammatical patterns of the language, neglecting the importance of building a large vocabulary of the target language. It was the communicative language approach, and later on, the natural approach that restored the right place of the vocabulary in teaching a foreign language. According to their proponents, vocabulary can better serve and can even by-pass grammar, especially in the early stages of second/foreign language teaching. Once the importance of vocabulary was acknowledged, many teaching methods have been promoted and came into use. The current paper intends to plead for one of these particular methods. The intention is to demonstrate that using stories to develop young learners‟ vocabulary is one of the most natural and successful methods. Partly because stories are known to provide a powerful means of human communication, and also they are very familiar to the world of young children. They grow up surrounded by stories, they know a lot about them and what to expect from them, or how to respond to these kinds of experiences. These abilities of young learners can be very convenient for the teacher to explore. Moreover, many researchers consider that reading or listening to stories, offers many opportunities to see or hear vocabulary in a meaningful and memorable context. The story context encourages students to learn new words incidentally by inferring the meaning of the words they do not know. Some patterns and vocabulary items are often repeated within a story, allowing the learners to be exposed to language in familiar contexts. Storytelling is a meaningful way to develop creative thinking and also to improve cooperative learning. According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary2, stories represent an important part of any culture. They are used to create cultural values, to entertain the listeners, and eventually to educate them. Through stories, we can improve students‟ cultural awareness, by offering the opportunity to be exposed to different cultures, people, or places. 2 Hornby, A.S., Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 7 th Edition, Oxford University Press, 1995 4 Selecting the most appropriate stories is obviously, of great importance because they would have to be attractive, memorable, with a captivating subject, revealing unusual characters, and with a careful choice of the narrative style to motivate the young learners to take part in these kinds of activities. As we are dealing with primary school students our intention is to develop a basic functional vocabulary. New words will be carefully selected, gradually introduced to make language learning smooth and easy. This basic vocabulary consists of items related to names of objects related to the students‟ the immediate reality, such as: body parts, family members, clothing, words related to the children‟s habitat, rooms of the house, home objects, and school objects. By nature children are very active and need to move, so they will have to learn action words in order to describe what they are doing. They also have to learn other word classes such as pronouns, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions. Therefore, when selecting the stories, we will have to keep in mind all these aspects as well. The current paper starts with the discussion about means of teaching vocabulary to students and continues with an overview on using stories as a central method. In the end, we will deal with the story–based activities in the English classroom. 5 I. TEACHING VOCABULARY TO STUDENTS 1.1. Teaching English to students The process of teaching is viewed as an expression of both artistic and scientific manifestation. This is due to the fact that a subjective activity such as teaching is performed in a very organized manner, following a set of rules. The main purpose of teaching is that of creating optimal conditions for the aimed learning process to take place. That implies there is a cause- effect relationship between teaching and learning and learning actually is the effect of teaching. This concept lies at the basis of the edifice of education. The process of education involves a considerable number of players, each of them providing an important contribution to the educational chain, however, the classroom teachers are those who bear the bourdon of the success or failure of the educational enterprise. Teachers are those who play an important role in the shaping and reshaping of the desired learning outcome and maximizing learning opportunities for their learners. But teaching will not necessarily lead to learning if we ignore the fact that the process of learning is above all a personal construct controlled by the individual learner. If we accept the process of learning being controlled by the learners, then we must accept that teachers can only try to create the necessary conditions for the learning to take place and we can conclude that the success of their efforts depends on their learners‟ willing cooperation to make the most of the learning conditions provided by educators. Teaching English to students requires that the teacher of English as a foreign language must first determine what he wants to do – that is to teach English, why he wants to do it – in order for his students to learn and use English and how he can best accomplish his objectives – that is how he should teach it. When we try to answer to the first question of what we discover that it is not that simple and teachers must understand that they cannot teach English in itself, but through content. Then, this content must be adapted to every age group and make use of different educational strategies according to the age of the learners. Language is in fact a system of signs socially accepted, that are known and shared by the entire language community and thanks to which the communication within the group is possible. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, human communication is a continuous process of encoding and decoding between the users of the same language. Continuing de Saussure‟s perspective, 6 Noam Chomsky 3 proposes the term of linguistic performance to nominate the speaker‟s actual use of language. The latter‟s ideas were borrowed by the foreign language teachers who established as their main goal to enhance their students with such linguistic competences and concluded that acquisition of a foreign language relied on learning: vocabulary, in terms of o spelling o pronunciation o meanings the grammatical structure of the foreign language However Chomsky‟s perspective was seen rather incomplete and the sociolinguist Dell Hymes 4 concludes that linguistic competence is just one aspect of the communicative competence a competent speaker must possess. As far as the why our students learn English we have to consider the continuously globalizing world that offers a new perspective to the words of “distance”, “on-line communication” or “tourism” as well as a change on educational and professional opportunities that turned English in the main instrument of communication in our modern world. And we finally reach the last but not least question of how can the teacher accomplish his goals, what strategies and methods can he use in order to endow his students with skills and practical abilities that enables them to use their knowledge of English in a flexible and effective way in an actual communicative situation. The four main skills 5 a foreign language teacher strives to develop in his students are: listening skills – that is the ability to understand oral messages reading skills – that is the ability to understand written messages speaking skills – that is the ability to produce oral messages writing skills – that is the ability to produce written messages 3 Chomsky, Noam, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT, 1965 4 Hymes, Dell, “On communicative competence”, in Gumprez, J.J. & Hymes, D., Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, New York, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1972 5 Vizental, Adriana, Metodica predării limbii engleze: Strategies of Teaching and Testing English as a Foreign Language, Polirom, Iași, 2014, p. 33 7 All these four skills are grouped in: receptive skills (listening and reading), where the speaker is a recipient of language and information productive skills (speaking and writing) where the speaker is involved in the act of producing language Knowing a foreign language means that you are able to understand what the other people say, that is to possess listening skills and you know what you are required to answer in a face –to –face interaction. Obviously listening skills cannot be separated from speaking skills. The one who receives the message must also have the ability to express his thoughts and feelings in a rational way, at a normal speed and with a comprehensible pronunciation. Since much of the daily communication is written, the language speaker must also possess reading skills in order to decode written messages in the target language. And this goes hand in hand with the writing skills that are required whenever the user has to express his thoughts in writing and there are many opportunities when this particular skill is necessary like when applying for a job abroad, or to fill out forms with personal information, write letters or simply chatting on the Internet. English classes provide limited situation for communicative contexts and this is why we stated in the beginning of this chapter that teaching is both art and science and that is the teacher‟s duty to turn his classes in a kind of laboratory and make full use of his creativity and imagination to organize real life communicative contexts. 1.2. The importance of teaching vocabulary Over the years the place of the vocabulary within the curriculum has changed greatly. During the audio-lingual approach it was seriously ignored and the focus shifted on the acquisition of the basic grammatical patterns of the language. It was important for the user to internalize these basic patterns, while building a large vocabulary could happen later. Hockett 6, a very influential linguist of the time, even argued that vocabulary was the easiest aspect of a foreign language to learn and it doesn‟t need specific attention in the classroom. The situation reversed under the influence of the communicative language teaching and Natural Approach 6 Hockett, Charles Francis, A Course in Modern Linguistics, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1958, p. 44 Next >