The use of story in a young learner’s classroom creates a good learning environment. Through stories, the language acquisition skill is activated and it becomes easy for children to induce the language elements from the data provided by the stories. Thus English language learners specially the young ones benefit from storytelling because stories help them to develop their ability to understand spoken language and engage in thinking skills.
Storytelling is a kind of reading which requires involvement of the children in construction of meaning. When children get fully involved, they feel the joy and satisfaction wherein they learn to understand. As a TEFL teacher, we help the children in class to develop constructive and creative comprehension.
When children listen to stories, in terms of comprehension response, they get involved in various mental processes. Like, initially they create a mental picture of what they are listening to. They soon start imagining what is going to happen next. Children often identify themselves with the characters and situations in the story in terms of their own experiences. And finally, children apply their own values to those found in the story. As such each child demonstrates differently to a story in regards to their own interpretation. They often discuss and share this analysis with others in the classroom.
There can be few techniques of storytelling to make it worthwhile:-
The TEFL teacher must be aloud in reading stories alongside making different gestures to make connections between oral language and the print in the book. The teacher must also point to the word or line to emphasize these connections. A very good tool for reading aloud could be use of big books with enlarged pictures. A story is more memorable when a student associates pictures with words.
-The main purpose of reading stories is to give students oral language input and a bridge to literacy in the new language. For teaching TEFL young learners, the teacher must introduce a lot of pre reading work which prepares the learners to be able to understand a story. This pre reading work involves building up vocabulary through different kinds of activities like games, puzzles, matching activities, songs etc that help them to get familiar with the English language as a new language to learn.
There are also few post reading tasks and language activities which make the story more comprehensible and they shift from the receptive side of listening and reading to more productive output of speaking and writing.
Repetitive stories are also very useful for young learners to memorize. When children listen to stories over and over, this repetition allows them to acquire certain language items and reinforce others unconsciously. Repetition makes books understandable and children learn the pattern and structure of a story and they eventually recognize words.
Thus teachers should select appropriate methodologies and didactic in order to make learning interesting and meaning for children. At the beginning of the process the basic story reading could be helpful. But it is surprising to see children’s individual response every time a teacher read a story. Hence they demonstrate understanding of the story and their language learning. The success of stories lies in taking an account of children’s like and interests and then eventually the process of reading has been followed appropriately.
Another important consideration is that in this early learning stage, children must be surrounded with a lot of meaningful, interesting and comprehensible input to help them grow. The greater amount of inputs received before and during the reading, the most amount of success is achievable. It also helps in infer, predict and answer to questions asked by teachers and thus show their understanding levels.
TEFL Young Learners course is an appropriate learning scope for the teachers to grab understanding as to how teaching and learning process can be practiced. The TEFL young learner teacher must be efficient in not just executing effective story telling but also know how to implement methodologies as discussed above in the most appropriate way. TEFL learners and teachers must bond well to share their mutual understanding that helps in the process of learning. Stories are just tools and the TEFL teacher must know the best use of those in making learning effective.
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