Students in primary schools are in the cognitive stage of imagery thinking. Iconic, episodic and interesting stories accord with the character of students’ thinking development. It also provides them with incomparably broad space for imaginary space. It conforms to students’ learning interests and cognitive levels by using stories in the class because the class is the main position of teaching activities. Successful story teaching will largely improve students’ language ability. Story-theme English teaching is the development and complement of story teaching method. It is the method that makes students creating story lines freely and developing their language ability in the process of repeating the story through the story situation. Story-theme English teaching is inspired by situational teaching method. Based on the basic ideas of task-based teaching method and the explanation of stories, students will finish the teaching tasks and achieve the teaching goal in the form of role playing. Story-theme English teaching motivates the students’ subjective initiative, makes classroom atmosphere lively, creates a relaxed learning environment and brings more experiences to students (Tan Guodong, 2013:12).
There are three aims of this study. First, study the values and feasibility of applying story-theme English teaching method in primary school English teaching. The study tries to find out whether story-theme method is suitable and feasible or not in primary school English teaching, and to discuss its possible impacts on teaching activities. By actually applying this method in English teaching classrooms, we can also know its values. Second, study teacher’s ideas towards story-theme method in primary school English teaching. This paper tries to study teachers’ ideas about story-theme teaching method by observing student’s reactions to this method and their learning effects. Finally, rethink researchers’ progress during the study. Researchers should aim at solving actual problems. They should constantly analyze, sum up and discover new problems during their study. They should also find solutions to those problems and employ the techniques they have found in daily teaching activities. Only in this way can they truly make progress, and this is also the ultimate goal of the study.
The paper has five parts. The introduction part introduces the background and the layout of the thesis. Part two introduces the definition and characteristics of story-theme English teaching method. Moreover, this part illustrates the comparison with traditional story English teaching method and relative researches at home and abroad of story English teaching method. Part three discusses the necessity of applying story-theme English teaching method in primary school from the aspects of language knowledge, language skills and communicative ability. Part four introduces the application of story-theme English teaching in primary school. Teaching implications, principles, implementing steps and case analysis will be presented in this part. In the last part the author sums up the limitations and suggestions of the present study.源:自*优尔`%论,文'网·www.youerw.com/
2. Literature Review
2.1 Definition and Characteristics of Story-theme English Teaching
Story-theme English teaching method, also known as story-theme teaching pattern, is a method of using lively storylines to teach. When using story-theme English teaching method, teachers should first determine the problem or topic. Then they need to select teaching materials on problem or topic. In this step, teachers should select relevant stories and then mix them with the teaching materials or directly use the story instead of the teaching materials. It aims to attract students’ attention , inspire their interests in learning and promote their thinking and comprehend the implied meaning of stories. The teacher will evaluate teaching effect through different activities (Barton&Booth, 2004:55-70). It is an especially suitable kind of teaching method for primary school students.