The Relationship Between Young Learners and Storytelling

By Ulfatun Maghfiroh (2201417036)

Young learner? 

Story-telling? 

Relationship?

 You guys might be questioning, what the relationship between them are. Before talking about it, let me bring you back to your childhood time first. The time when there were no gadget, internet nor game. At that time, we were busy playing and going around with our friends. At the end we were talking a horror story to make each of our friends frightening. For me the best part of them is the horror story session. Because it could enrich our knowledge and enhance our imagination about things we don’t know about. It could also bring us to draw a colorful picture with various interesting characters. In short, we loved to listen somebody else’s stories. 

Let's go back to the right track, here is the explanation:

Who are young learners?

Young learners are those who born till at the age of twelve years old. 

What is storytelling?

Storytelling is one of the famous techniques in learning language process that refers to presenting a story in front of other peoples. 

What is the relationship between them?

Storytelling is a useful technique to attract young learners’ focus during instruction. Through telling a story, we could give more chance for kids to find out real life and language learning experience together. It could help young learners to get more knowledge, imagination, literacy and critical thinking. 

Therefore, storytelling would be useful to teach young foreign language learners. It promotes oral and written language development and present new vocabularies and complex language. On the other words, storytelling is an important tool for language teaching and learning.

In order to create constructive and creative comprehension, storytelling for young learners is very important. Storytelling motivates children to be active participant in constructing meaning of the story. 

What methods could we use in doing storytelling? 

There are various kinds of methods that can be used to teach young learner using storytelling technique. 

Circle Stories

The teacher starts a story by describing a setting and introducing a character to the students. A student sitting next to the teacher will continue the story and then pass it on

to the next student etc.

This method is great to enhance students’ creativity in developing a story and boost confident level among students on public. However, it is little bit hard for those who are troubling in building a spontaneous idea. We have to know that people are different. There are people who are genius, but the rest are not. We have to tolerate it.  

Creating Character Profiles

Allow students to work with a various material to help them generate ideas about

characters e.g. Monkey, Tulips, Shoes. Then, ask them in pairs or small groups to look for a character and to describe the character by including information such as where they live, their age, what sort of family they have, what do they like to do in their spare time.

This method promotes active learning process and boosts students confident’ level. 

Readers’ Theatre

      This involves groups of pupils assuming characters from a story and     reading the script aloud to the class. It allows a book to come alive in this learning and teaching. it encourages students to consider volume, pace, pausing, tone, gesture and facial expression when presenting. 

Readers’ Theatre can be easily organized by following these steps;

Choosing a suitable text from many books and websites provide scripts for Readers’  Theatre

Decide which groups will be allocated to which character

Ask the groups to highlight the text of their allocated character

Ask groups to decide where sound effects and props could be used

Allow time for groups to practice their lines as a group several times

Allow time for the whole class recital of the text

What study shown about that relationship?

     A study entitled “the power of storytelling in teaching English to young learners” by Mutiarani and Lidiyatul (UMJ) found that Storytelling can be a very effective teaching tool as it is adopted to the students’ proficiency level, interest, age and needs. It is more efficient in case of younger learners who have not developed their abstract thinking yet, and who are very creative and imaginative.  

So, in your opinion what is the other best techniques for teaching young students? 

You may take and save this question on yourself and try to answer based on the knowledge you have. 

I hope that this article you could enrich your knowledge and useful for you all. Thank you. 

Bibliography 

PSDT (Professional Development Service for Teachers). Five Components of Effective Oral Language Instruction. Dublin,  (n.d).

Mutiarani & Izzah. (2015). The power of Storytelling in Teaching English to Young Learners. In Nurafni & A. Vinayastri (Eds.), 1st International Seminar Childhood Care and Education: Asiyah's Awareness on Early Childhood and Education (pp. 70-81). Indonesia: Zikrul Hakim, UNHAMKA.