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The Application of Story-telling Method in Primary School English Teaching Chapter One  Introduction论文网

    Primary school students are mostly in a stage of visual image, with a strong sense of curiosity about everything concrete and sensible around them。 Thus in English teaching, teachers are supposed to grasp this kind of psychological characteristics to avoid mechanically preaching, and take every flexible and interesting method to draw attention from their students。 Story-telling method has effectively realized a combination of knowledge and ability and merged English knowledge into stories to help students get rid of rote-learning by creating a pleasant atmosphere for students to learn English from stories and proactively communicate with classmates and teachers to make them study and utilize English in a more flexible way。

1。1 Definition of story-telling method

    British educator Andrew Wright (1995) points out that stories are particularly important in the lives of our children; stories help children to understand their world and to share it with others。 Story-telling method, a teaching approach with the help of the story also called situational teaching approach, is a kind of concentration, simplification and edutainment。 Teachers alternate relevant stories to illustrate and emphasize, or even replace the original teaching contents, so as to draw attentions from students, arouse their interest, and inspire them to think, from which students are able to learn lessons and acquire knowledge effectively。 文献综述

1。2 Significance of the study

    Primary school children are mostly being in the cognitive stage of image thinking, or a transitional awareness stage from image thinking to abstract thinking。 Story’s features of visualization, interestingness and episode comply with the cognitive characteristics of primary students。 Specifically these stories are able to provide them with a vast imaginary space, and effectively train their thinking ability。

    Story-telling method is exactly a teaching method based on novels and interesting stories, and blending students’ down-to-earth life experiences and their multi-disciplinary knowledge。 It caters to students’ affection for stories, and meanwhile brings a sense of intimacy and familiarity to them, which could make the monotonous study more interesting as well as arouse their learning initiative。 Moreover, different activities organized by the story-telling method should have their particular functions。 For example, listening to stories and telling stories are applied to unconsciously foster children’s sense of English language and their listening-speaking ability, while acting story is applied to effectively cultivate students’ team-work spirit, and promote the cooperative learning among students。 Therefore, story-telling method is supposed to be applied appropriately in primary English class。

    Although the benefits of story-telling method have been reported for many times in educational research literature and periodicals, few studies provide an in-depth analysis of how story-telling method is applied in primary school English teaching。 In China, experts in education seldom conduct investigations into this field。 Therefore, this study hopes to fill the gap。 This study explores the concrete usages of story-telling method in primary English aiming to help teachers use this method in class more effectively and extensively。 And this study in order to solve the problems occurred in the practical application also supplies many useful suggestions for teachers。 With these advice, teachers can further improve the class teaching efficiency。 Seeking to fill the gap of researching the application of the story-telling method, the study also hopes that it can provide references for teachers’ every teaching activity in their future work。