ENGLISH FOR YOUNG LEARNERS

Learning Through Stories

Written By :
Dian Ayu P. A (210917064)
Inggar Erna S (210917063)
Rohadatul Aisy Z. N (210917048)
Yusuf Fajar N (210917079)

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND TEACHERS’ TRAINING
ISLAMIC STATE OF INSTITUTE PONOROGO
2020
 PREFACE

First at all, give thanks for God’s love and grace for us. Thanks to God for
helping me and give me chance to finish this assignment timely.
Wish this assignment are useful for everyone who read it. This assignment is
all about Learning Through Stories in Early Childhood Education. Thank you very
much to my lecturer Miss Umi Rachmawati who gave me many knowledge about
english.
The author realizes that this assignment is still a lot of mistakes. So for the
sake of this assignment perfectly, constructive criticism and suggestions really I need.

Author,

27 February 2020

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface .............................................................................. ii

Table of Contents .............................................................................. iii

CHAPTER 1 ..................................................................

A. General .................................................................. 1
B. Problem Formulation ...................................................... 1

CHAPTER 2 ..................................................................

A. Stories and Theme ................................................................. 2

B. The Discourse Organisation of stories .............................. 3
C. Language Use in Stories ...................................................... 3
D. Quality in stories .................................................................. 5
E. Choosing Stories to promote language learning .................. 6
F. Ways of using a story ...................................................... 6
G. How to Teach Use Story ………………………………………. 7

CHAPTER 3 Final ......................................................

A. CONCLUSION .................................................................. 10

REFERENSES .................................................................. iv

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 CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

A. GENERAL
The use of stories in language education is well attested. Stories may
also be used across the curriculum to teach content subjects. Life itself is full
of stories: stories told to inform, entertain, appreciate, stories about happiness,
sadness and many more. This has inspired me to become interested in using
stories as a tool in teaching and learning. I believe stories can be a powerful
tool if used effectively across the curriculum. I believe that stories can be used
in developing language.

B. PROBLEM FORMULATING
1. What is story and themes in Learning Throung Stories?
2. How the discourse organisation of stories in Learning Through Stories?
3. How Language use in stories?
4. Is quality in stories important?
5. How choosing stories to promote language learning?
6. How ways of using a story?

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 CHAPTER 2

DISCUSSION

A. Stories and Themes

Stories and themes are placed together because they represent holistic
approaches to language teaching and learning that place a high premium on
children involvement with rich, authentic uses of the foreign language. Stories
offer a whole imaginary world, created by language, that children can enter
and enjoy, learning language as they go. Themes begin from an
overachingtopic or idea that can branch out in many different direction,
allowing chiodren to pursue personal interests through the foreign language.
Stories bring into the classroom texts that originate in the world
outside school; themes organise content and activity around ideas or topics
that are broader than the organising ideas in most day to day classroom
language learning, and that might be found structuring events outside the
classroom such as television documentaries or community projects.
In continuing to develop a learning-centered perspective to teaching
foreign languages to children, I will emphasise the need for teachers to plan
classroom work with clear language learning goals in mind.
Stories are frequently claimed to bring many benefits to young learner
classrooms, including language development (Wright 1997; Garvie 1990). The
Power attributed to stories, which sometimes seems to move towards the
mystical and magical, is probably generated by their links into poetics and
literature in one direction and to the warmth of early childhood experiences in
another. Stories can be serve as metaphors for society or for our deepest
psyche (Bettleheim 1976), and parent-child story reading can be rich and
intimate events that contrast sharply with the linear aridity of syllabuses and
some course book (Garton and Pratt 1998).
However, classrooms are not family sitting rooms, teachers are not
their pupils’ parents, and many of the texts in books found in schools are not
poetic, meaningful stories that will instantly capture children’s imagination. I
suggest that we can best serve young learners by adopting a critical stance to
the use of stories, aiming to clarify the qualities of good stories for the
language classrooms.

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 Children participate in many literacy events outside school that involve
texts that are not stories, and that combine text and visuals in varied and
dynamic ways.
We look first at what we mean by stories, differentiating stories from
other kinds ofntext in terms of what they contain and how they are composed.
We examine quality stories, and how we can discriminate good stories from
less good ones. We then move to what makes a story useful for foreign
language learning.

B. The Discourse Organisation of Stories

Story telling is an oral activity, and stories have the shape they do
because they are designed to be listened to and, in many situation, participated
in. The first, obvious, key organising feature of stories is that events happen at
different points in time; they occur in a temporal sequences. The other key
organising feature of stories is their thematic structure i.e. there is some central
interest factor (theme) that changes over the timescale of the story: difficulties
or evil are overcome, or a major event is survived. Very often the thematic
structure of a story can be characterised as the resolution of a problem (Hoey
1983).
The structur of typical stories was analysed by propp (1957) and many
of the same features have been found in analyses of how people tell stories in
their conversations (Labov 1972). Prototypical features of stories are :
1. An opening. “once upon a time”
2. Introduction of characters
3. Description of the setting
4. Introduction of a problem
5. A series of events
6. The resolution of the problem
7. A closing
8. A moral

C. Language Use in Stories

1. Parallelism

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 The repeat pattern or parallelism creates a way into the story
for the active listener, as well as providing a natural support for
language learning.
2. Rich Vocabulary
Because stories are designed to entertain, writers and tellers
choose and use words with particular care to keep the audience
interested. Story may thus include unusual words, or words
thathave a strong phonological content, with interesting rhythms or
sounds thta are onomatopoeic. The context created by story, its
predictable pattern or events and language, and pictures, all act to
support listeners’ understanding of unfamiliar words. Children will
pick up words that they enjoy and, in this way, stories offer space
for growth in vocabulary.
3. Alliteration
Aliteration is the use of words that have the same initial
consonants. For exampole, red riding and big bad. It can offer a
source for developing knowledge of letter sounds.
4. Contrast
Stories for children often contain strong contrasts between
characters or actions or setting. Placing ideas in such clear
opposition may well help children’s understanding of the story as
a whole. For language learning, the lexical items that are used in
connection with each idea will also form contrasting sets, that may
help understanding and recall.
5. Metaphor
Bettleheim (1976) suggests that our early experiences with
fairy stories map subconsiously on to our real world experiences,
and become a kind of script for our lives. Claims of such power for
these simpel tales takes us far beyond the foreign language
classroom, although there are gifted individuals who have used
‘story making’ for educational and personal development (e.g
Marshall 1963).

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 6. Intertextuality
This is the term used to dercribe making references within one
text to aspects of other texts that have become part of shared
cultural knowledge.
When children begin to write their own stories, or little dramas,
they may, just as adults writer do, involve familiar characters or
pieces of language from stories they know. This appropriation of
the voice of a writer is an integral part of first language
development (Bakhtin 1981), and can help in foreign language
learning too.
7. Narrative/Dialogue
Within a story, we can distinguish two main uses of language:
for narrative and for dialogue. Narrative text concerns the series of
events, whereas dialogue is use of language as it would be spoken
by the characters.

D. Quality in Stories
The issue of what makes a good quality story is important but is clearly
bound to be somewhat subjective. A good story is, at one level, simply one
that listeners enjoy. However, stories that appeal more that others, and that
remains favourites with children and parents over many years, do demonstrate
some common features that can be identified as characterising quality.
Quality stories have characters and a plot that engage children, often
the art work is as important as the text in telling the story, and they create a
strong feeling of satisfaction when the end is reached. A convincing and
satisfying closure includes the reader in those who ‘live happily ever after’.
Children need to be able to enter the imaginative world that the story
creates. This means that they can understand enough about the characters and
their lives to be able to empathise with them. So, a story about being lost in the
desert that is ti be used with children in arctic countries will need to contain
lots of detail taht enables them to imagine what a desert looks and feels like to
be in. Many stories for children include fantastical beings or animals in
imaginary worlds, but these characters and settings usually bear enough
resemblance to children and tehir real worlds for readers to imagine them;

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 monsters tend to live in families, tigers come to drink tea in the kitchen, frogs
and ducks get jealous – all act in ways familiar to children.
Stories that have the qualities of content, organisation and language
use that we have explored thus far are potentially useful tools in the foreign
language classroom, since they have a potential to capture children’s interest
and thus motivation to learn, along with space for language growth. However,
not all good stories will be automatically good for language learning, and we
now move to think about what is involved in choosing and using a stories not
just for pleasure, but for (pleasurable) language learning.

E. Choosing Stories to Promote Language Learning

In this section, we use the features of stories described so far to set out
questions that a language teacher might ask to evaluate the language learning
opportunities offered by a story in order to choose stories for the language
classroom.
1. Real books of specially written ones?
2. Will the content engage the learners?
3. Are the values and attitudes embodied in the story acceptable?
4. How is the discourse organised?
5. What is the balance of dialogue and narrative?
6. How is language used?
7. What new language is used?

F. Ways Of Using A Story

1. Evaluating the language learning opportunities of the story
Answers to the questions from the previous section help work towards
activities.
2. Language learning tasks using the story
a. Preparation activity : brainstorming vocabulary
b. Core activity: reading the story
c. Follow up activity: vocabulary learning

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G. How To Teach Using Story
Follow-up activities:
 Story Sequencing
In this activity students are encouraged to collaborate to recall a
familiar story, illustrating the key stages and retelling it to their classmates.
Instructions:
1. In groups, students decide on the key stages of the story they are going
to illustrate. Stronger groups of students should be encouraged to think
of more stages (this provides differentiation).
2. Hand a piece of blank paper to each group and ask them to draw lines to
divide the paper into equal-sized boxes. They will need one box for each
key stage of the story, so if a group has more stages it might be better to
give them several pieces of paper so they have enough space for their
drawings. (Alternatively, you could pre-make these before the class and
hand them out to groups)
3. In each box, students draw a picture to represent the key stages of the
story. Depending on the level of the class/group, they could write a
sentence (or more) underneath each picture to describe what is
happening.
4. Students take turns retelling the whole story with the others in their
group, using the pictures and words to help them.
5. Students then cut up the page and divide the pictures equally between
the members of the group.
6. The group works together to retell the story for their classmates, with
each member reading out their part and showing their pictures in the
correct order.
7. The pictures can be kept in an envelope and used again in future lessons.
(You might want to write a number on the back of each picture for later
reference)

 ‘Lift The Flap’ Book

In this activity children learn the meaning and form of words in context
by creating illustrated flaps to cover key words in a book.
Instructions:

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 1. In groups, the children each select a word from a page of the book and
copy it on to a piece of paper. (Monitor to make sure the chosen words
can be easily illustrated and that the whole group understands the
meaning of each word; you may wish to give groups specific pages from
the book to look through, so they don’t all choose the same pages/words)
2. Divide the words between the members of the group, so that students
have a different word to the one they initially chose. Ask them not to
show the others what they got! Give each student one Post-it note.
3. Each student should cut up their Post-it notes to create a flap to stick
over their word in the book (but don’t stick them on the book yet!). They
should then each draw a picture on the Post-it to illustrate the meaning
of their word.
4. Students show their drawings to the others in their group and see if they
can guess the word.
5. Stick the Post-it notes over the words in the book.
6. Choose someone to be the ‘teacher’ and read the story to the class.
7. When the storyteller reaches a flap, he or she should stop and show the
drawing. The other students should call out the word, and the storyteller
can then lift the flap to see if they are right.

 Storyboarding
In this activity children retell a familiar story, and then the teacher
takes photos to create a storyboard.
Instructions:
1. After reading a short story out loud, put the children in groups.
2. Students should choose between 5–10 key moments in the story, and
then recreate those scenes using their bodies and/or other props. (Note:
Depending on your class size and the time you have available, you could
either ask each group to choose and recreate their own key scenes, or
choose the key scenes as a class and assign one or two to each group.)
3. Take photos of each scene, upload them to the computer and print them
out. (You may want to print each image on to white paper with some
space below it, if you want students to try step 5.)

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4. Within their groups, students can then put the images in order and take
turns to retell the story to each other.
5. With guidance, students can write sentences below each image and
staple it together like a book.
6. A shortened version of this activity is to photocopy images from the
story (laminate if possible to make them more durable), mix them up,
then hand them out (in sets) to groups. The groups then have to put them
back into the correct order and retell the story. It can be made into a race,
with points awarded to the group who finishes correctly first.

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 CHAPTER 3

FINAL

A. CONCLUSION
In teaching language to young learners, we can use story, or short story,
to help children understand about new language, theme and symbol, and to
introduce learners to storytelling. Stories offer a whole imaginary world,
created by language, that children can enter and enjoy, learning language as
they go. Learning new vocabulary did not cause many serious difficulties.
Actually, teacher must be creative when they in way of story. Don’t make
children bored, make an interesting class.

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 REFERENCES

Cameron, Lynne. 2001. Teaching Languages To Young Learners.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Zygardyova, Lucie. 2006. Using Stories In Teaching English To Young
Learners. BRNO: Masaryk University In BRNO
Team. Learning English Through Short Stories. British: British
Council

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