Page 53 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Story-Based Approach

Figure 2.3
Story-Telling and Acting
out the Story ‘Brown Bear
Brown Bear What Do
You See’?

involved in the story, they identify with the characters which helps them
interpret and make sense of the narrative but also develop their own cre-
ativity and imaginative power. In addition, stories develop children’s cogni-
tive abilities. In classroom activities with stories, children are often encour-
aged to guess the meaning of unknown words, predict and hypothesise the
events in the story, which helps them develop important learning strategies
and higher-order thinking skills. Stories also provide opportunities for cross-
linguistic and cross-cultural comparison (Brewster et al. 2002; Mourão, 2009).
Like other approaches, the story-based approach may follow a character-
istic procedure (Li & Seedhouse, 2010):

•the pre-story stage involves various warm-up activities (pre-teaching
key vocabulary, drawing the children’s attention to the topic with
puppets or activating learners’ background knowledge through ques-
tions),
•the in-story stage in which the teacher uses different reading tech-
niques to make sure the pupils understand and enjoy the story,
•the post-story stage in which the teacher uses a number of different
follow-up activities to develop creativity and reinforce language learn-
ing (such as playing games, recreating the story, using TPR, etc.).

There is a great selection of stories and story books available to teachers
for use in the YLs’ classroom. However, choosing the appropriate book for a
particular class or group of pupils can be fairly challenging. Teachers should
pay special attention to the choice of content as pupils have to be able to
identify with the topic covered by the story, it should trigger their interest,

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