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The most important and essential thing required for effective teaching is attention. Only if the listener or the audience attentively listens to what is being taught, they can absorb the majority of the contents. Stories play a vital role in gaining attention. Students, especially children are not easy to teach because their attentiveness is sporadic. Storytelling can serve as one of the best ways to gain their attention and make them learn things. Almost all children love to listen to stories because they feel free to explore their world of imagination filled with the characters, plots, colors, and emotions from them. Hence, language learning can be perfectly practiced taking advantage of this perk of storytelling. The first and foremost importance of stories in teaching English lies in the way children can improve their vocabulary and learn new and meaningful words. Children start comprehending the story and give their best in the effort to understand every storyline. They give their full attention and use creative comprehension techniques as well. Both oral, as well as written vocabulary and understanding skill, gets burgeoned by reading or listening to stories. “While children listen to stories, they try to guess the meaning of new words and also concentrate on the pronunciation of words or sentences.” Furthermore, during their effort to interpret the stories, they even learn the idea of timings, the series of events that take place, giving them an in-depth understanding of the language and its various forms of uses. They learn numerous sentence patterns, basic structures of English grammar, tense structures and numerous more ideas on how the language could be used to express different scenarios. The attention they have towards understanding the story helps in amplifying the extent to which they learn the use of the English language. Furthermore, stories play a vital role in introducing new facets of the world to young children. As an instance, a story that revolves around a forest would make them learn the names of different birds, animals, and other living organisms that reside inside forests. Similarly, reading or listening to fairy tales and religious stories would make them learn many objects and beings and their English names. Children might come from a variety of background but a story introduces all of them to a single event that might be based upon any particular incident. If the story is of appropriate length, includes the elucidation of events via pictures and cartoons and is written in a simple yet intuitive form of English language, then optimum benefit can be gained from the story. In a research performed by Dr. Khaleel, it was concluded that a substantial number of students and children agreed that their english skill, writing skill, vocabulary and their ability to guess the meaning of new words were improved by english stores. These developments in the English skill, even though it was not their first language, prove that stories are one of the best ways to engage children in language and its use. In conclusion, stories help in grabbing the attention of children and make them spare no pains in trying to comprehend the actual storyline. This is because of their imagination which is associated while reading and listening to stories. Furthermore, the series of events used in stories, the structure of the language used, vocabularies and different sentence structures helps in improving their overall performance in the English language. A story that is written in simple language and contains a pictorial representation of major events helps children in further understanding the way the English language is used to explain everything in it, which would ultimately help in improving their speaking, listening and reading ability. Bibliography Izzah, Lidiyatul. “The Power Of Storytelling In Teaching English To Young Learners.” Zenodo, June 11, 2015. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.1214962. Khaleel, Mousa. “Using Stories In Teaching English.” International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications 7, no. 3 (March 2017): 387–92.
