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.
Lecturați gratuit The Importance of Stories in Teaching Vocabulary, autor Miron Elena Daniela
Lucrarea poate fi citită online în Biblioteca Didactică (www.bibliotecadidactica.ro). ISBN 978-630-317-386-3
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.