Storytelling in EFL classes: Why and how?

Stories have always played a significant role in a child’s life. They help in stimulating imagination and understanding of the world, as well as in developing children's language ability.

The reason why I recommend storytelling in the EFL classroom is because stories are interesting, engaging and stimulating. They can best attract attention and promote communication. Stories create a lively and real life environment. When telling or listening to a story, learners will be dragged into the story and forget about themselves, which may relieve their nervousness and fear of making mistakes.

Now you might ask: will I only use stories with kids? No, stories are not only for kids.  There are Depending on how you work with stories, what focus or objective you have, stories can be used with EFL learners of different levels and ages.

I’m not only talking about storytelling because it’s fun and you should use it in your classes, I also want to present to you 2 resources to make storytelling even more interesting and appealing.

The first one is a website called My Story Book. It’s very user-friendly and easy to use. You can use it to create a story book from scratch: you choose the characters, the environment and props, add sentences and pages. Of course it might take a while, but students do not necessarily need to do it in class, it can be assigned as homework and presented the following class. To better suit your students’ needs, you can set a given theme, topic or structure to be the starting point of their stories. The story could be a written or spoken assignment (for the latter, students can create the story with no sentences, and tell the story to their peers in class).

The second resource is called Story Wheel. The fun part in this app is that you have to spin the wheel to get a word in order to continue the story, so it’s always a surprise. It’s a great app for chain stories. Students can record the whole story and listen to it later on.

I’m sure there are tons of other apps and websites for storytelling, have you ever used any? Share with us!!