Storytelling
Nan (2015) introduced Storytelling as an effective way to apply what the students learn to real communication. She argued that by listening, speaking, reading, and writing some stories, students can absorb and practice the knowledge of English grammar in real life contexts that they are familiar with and telling the stories can improve students’ understanding of the tenses which are a big challenge for Chinese EFL learners. For example, the teacher can tell his or her own stories first, and show them the differences of past, present, and future tenses; the students need to answer some questions after listening to the story; the teacher can check if they recognize and understand the different tenses according to their answers and then provide them with reading material of the story to reinforce the understanding of the form and meaning of different tenses; next, the students can have a free talk related to the topic of the teacher’s story based on their interest and experience, which encourages them to listen to and tell more stories they are interested in; at last, the teacher can ask them to write down their stories as a writing assignment( Nan, 2015). In this way, Nan (2015) believed that the students will learn the meaning, form, and use of each grammatical structure in a meaningful context and communicative interactions.
Feel free to watch the video below to learn more about teaching grammar by storytelling.
An introduction toTPR Storytelling (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling or TPRS) .
This is an intermediate/high intermediate lesson. Learn the basic skills involved in telling past tense stories including using time words, mixing past and present tense, and reporting the speech of others using "said."
This is a lesson demo showing how to teach adverbs and tenses by storytelling.
An interesting video demonstrates English grammar stories.