How storytelling can work as a pedagogy to facilitate children’s English as a foreign language learning

Abstract

Storytelling has a long tradition in education including language learning and teaching because of its extensive benefits in language development. In second and foreign language education, stories and storytelling have been integrated into school curricula to enhance language development; however, there is scarce empirical evidence about how storytelling facilitates children’s English as a foreign language (EFL) learning and its potential as a holistic pedagogy. This article explores a living educational theory (Whitehead & McNiff, 2006) of how storytelling works as a pedagogy in storytelling workshops with an English class at a private tuition centre in Vietnam to facilitate children’s EFL learning. Key pedagogical elements identified through the living theory methodology included storytelling as: a responsive strategy; multimodal scaffolding; mutual inspiration; and a linguistic model. Each of these elements is explained with illustrative examples from the storytelling workshops.