摘 要
近年来，研究者们越来越关注讲故事对于第二语言教学的重要性。然而，国内这方面的研究者却相对较少。即使有，也主要针对大学、高中和小学英语教学，对于初中英语讲故事教学方面的研究寥寥无几。为了弥补这一遗憾，本文对讲故事教学法对初中生英语学习能力的培养进行了研究。
本文由初中英语新课程标准引出讲故事教学法，指出它对初中生英语能力培养的影响；接着阐述支撑讲故事教学法的相关的四个理论基础，分别是交际理论，克拉申的情感过滤假说，图式理论及建构主义理论，然后提出国内外教育学家们对讲故事教学法的看法，接下来讨论了讲故事教学法对英语能力培养的积极影响。然后设计调查问卷对讲故事教学法应用时的情况及初中生对讲故事教学法的态度进行分析。最后对研究做出总结。
关键词：讲故事教学法；初中英语；英语能力培养
ABSTRACT
Recently researchers pay more and more attention to the importance of storytelling in learning and teaching a second language. However, there are not many researches of this kind in China. Moreover, most researches have been done in universities, high schools, and primary schools; there is little research of this kind in middle school. In order to compensate for the limitation, this paper does a research on the influence of storytelling teaching on English ability of middle school students.
The paper first advances the English Curriculum Criterion in Compulsory Education Phase (for experimental use) in order to advance the storytelling and point out the influence of storytelling to the development of the English ability of junior middle school students. Then it provides four related theories of storytelling: theory of communication, Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis, theory of schema and theory of constructivism. Next it offers educationalists' views on storytelling. Then it discusses the positive influence of storytelling on English ability. Next it offers a questionnaire of the situation of using storytelling teaching and provides students attitude towards storytelling teaching. Finally it draws a conclusion of this paper.
Keywords：Storytelling; Junior Middle School English; Development of English ability
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Related theories 2
2.1 Theory of communication 2
2.2 Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis 3
2.3 Theory of schema 3
2.4 Theory of constructivism 4
3. Educationalists’ views on storytelling 6
3.1 The research of storytelling in China 6
3.2 The research of storytelling abroad 6
3.2.1 Main reasons for exploiting stories: 6
3.2.2 The relationship between children and stories 7
3.2.3 The function of storytelling 8
4. The positive influence of storytelling on English ability 9
4.1 Listening ability 9
4.2 Speaking ability 10
4.3 Reading ability 11
4.4 Writing ability 12
5. Data presentation and discussion 14
5.1 Data presentation 14
5.2 Discussion 16
6. Conclusion 17
Acknowledgements 18
References 19
1. Introduction
The rapid development of the technology and the deepening of the reform and opening-up has made foreign language, especially English, an indispensable tool in international communication. To cultivate students' foreign language ability, the key is to pay special attention to the middle school foreign language teaching. The English Curriculum Criterion in Compulsory Education phase (for experimental use) published in 2006 pointed out that the task of the Middle English curriculum is encouraging and developing the students’ interests of learning English. It also pointed out that English teaching should make students master the basic knowledge of English and the ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and should be student-centered and that much attention should be paid to the students' physical and psychological development and their interests, so that they would learn English in carefree and lively atmosphere [1]2.According to these rules, there are many teaching method existing in today’s English teaching, among them storytelling teaching is seldom. The author believes storytelling is a good teaching method, for it can provide carefree and lively atmosphere for students to learn English.
This thesis tries to find out a better way for the students to learn English well by telling stories during English teaching of junior middle schools，so that their interests can be developed. The aim is to develop their synthetic abilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing and to establish a kind of attractive study and life for the students.
This thesis is composed of 6 chapters with the first one give a brief explanation of the purpose of this thesis. Chapter 2 briefly introduces storytelling and provides theoretical support for storytelling in this thesis. Chapter 3 provides educationalists' views on storytelling. Chapter 4 explains the positive influence of storytelling teaching on listening, speaking, reading and writing. Then comes chapter 5 which presents data from questionnaire and has an analysis of the data. The last chapter draws a conclusion to the whole thesis.
2. Related theories
Storytelling is the art of us
ing language, vocalization and/or physical movement and gesture to reveal the elements and images of a story to a specific live audience. It is a unique teaching method, invented by famous English educator William Smith, specially for developing Chinese students' English ability of listening and speaking. From 1990s, professor Smith has being worked in many Chinese colleges to teach oral English. In accordance with Chinese students' weak oral English, he discovered storytelling, an effective teaching method [2]1. It is based on four theories—Theory of Communication, Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis, Theory of Schema and Theory of Constructivism.
2.1 Theory of communication
The communicative approach to language teaching starts from a theory of language as communication. The goal of language teaching is to develop learners “communicative competence” (CC), which is the knowledge enabling someone to use a language effectively, and their ability actually to use this knowledge for communication.
The concept of communicative competence was originally developed thirty years ago by the sociolinguist Hymes, as a response to perceived limitations in Chomsky's competence/performance model of language. Hymes’ new concept of communicative competence has four components: possibility – the ability to produce grammatical sentences; feasibility – the ability to produce sentences which can be decoded by the human brain; appropriateness – the ability to use correct forms of language in a specific sociocultural context; performances – the fact that the utterance is completed. In sum, says Hymes, “the goal of a broad theory of competence can be said to be to show the ways in which the systematically possible, the feasible, and the appropriate are linked to produce and interpret actually occurring cultural behavior”. At the same time, Halliday, Wilkins, Widdowson, and Brumfit and Johnson also emphasized “the functional and communicative potential of language. They saw the need to focus on communicative proficiency rather than on mere mastery of structures”. Influenced by these views of language learning and teaching, the author believes storytelling teaching as a manifestation of communicative language teaching (CLT) came into existence with explicit attention on “language in use”, which expanded the dimension of language from the previous linguistic forms to communicative function [3]4.
2.2 Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis
Affective Filter hypothesis embodies Krashen's view that a number of 'affective variables' play a facilitative, but non-causal, role in second language acquisition. These variables include: motivation, self-confidence and anxiety. Krashen claims that learners with high motivation, self-confidence, a good self-image, and a low level of anxiety are better equipped for success in second language acquisition. Low motivation, low self-esteem, and debilitating anxiety can combine to 'raise' the affective filter and form a 'mental block' that prevents comprehensible input from being used for acquisition. In other words, when the filter is 'up' it impedes language acquisition. On the other hand, positive affect is necessary, but not sufficient on its own, for acquisition to take place. Storytelling teaching is on the basis of this hypothesis. It can eliminate students’ psychology pressure. Students in a more relaxed and lively atmosphere, it is easier for them to overcome language learning anxiety, eliminate psychological pressure and build self-confidence [4]4.
2.3 Theory of schema
The conception of schema was first proposed by German psychologist Bartlett in 1932. He defines schema as“ an active organization of past reactions, or past experience•” He believes the core of schema theory is that these“ past reactions or past experience” effect functions in comprehension. But the bases of the conception can be traced earlier to the establishment of Gestalt psychology, which means shape and form, and emphasized holistic properties.
Gestalt psychology studies the mental organization and emphasizes that this mental organization is dynamic, which means that with some stimuli or certain given information, the mental organization will automatically process these information by making up for the information not given, interpreting the given information and making coherent understanding of the information. Since Gestalt psychology can account for part of the cognitive structure of human beings, many researchers of reading attempt to apply it to accommodate the mental activities, which relate to a large extent to how people process information and obtain the meaning in their reading activities [5]3.F. Bartlett, J. Anderson and L. Pearson thought storytelling is the brain to have reconstruction of schema, and is a process of integration of schema and new information.
2.4 Theory of
constructivism
Constructivism, developed in the late 1950s, is a philosophy of learning founded on the premise that, by reflecting on our experiences, we construct our own understanding of the world we live in. Each of us generates our own "rules" and "mental models," which we use to make sense of our experiences. Learning, therefore, is simply the process of adjusting our mental models to accommodate new experiences. This branch of learning theories is concerned with the things that happen inside our heads as we learn. In the constructivist theories knowledge is viewed as a constructed entity made by each and every learner through a learning process. Learning is therefore not just about memorizing facts but the active process of integrating new experiences and information with existing concepts. Rather than simply absorbing ideas communicated to them by teachers, students take those ideas and assimilate them with their pre-existing notions and experience to modify their knowledge and understanding in a more complex, complete and refined way. Teaching is the process which, through various means from the arrangement of texts to the design of reading activities, supports this construction and reconstruction of new knowledge rather than the communication of knowledge. Those contributing to constructivism include Dewey (social constructivism), Vygotsky (scaffolding and the zone of proximal development), Piaget (stages of development), Bruner (discovery learning), Papert (microworlds), Seely Brown (cognitive apprenticeships), Vanderbilt’s cognition and technology group (anchored instruction), Spiro and others (flexibility theory and radical constructivism) and Gardner (multiple intelligences). Though there are a number of theories that come under the label constructivism they all have a similar view of learners as being actively engaged in a process of integrating new experiences and information with existing concepts. They suggest that learners’ pre-existing knowledge, skills, beliefs and concepts influence what they notice about the world they live in and how they organize and interpret it [6]3. Research suggests that storytelling is most effective when used to enhance constructivist or student-centered instructional strategies because it emphasizes interactivity, learner control and student engagement.
3. Educationalists’ views on storytelling
A story in its broadest sense is anything told or recounted; more narrowly, something told or recounted in the form of a causally-linked set of events, account, tale, the telling of a happening or connected series of happenings, whether true or fictitious. The story or storytelling has received a lot of consideration from educationalists and practitioners for a long time [7]1.
3.1 The research of storytelling in China
Wang Jianfeng considered storytelling is an effective way to cultivate students’ sense of language. Storytelling teaching method is a method which puts the English phrases and sentences into the story. When students listen to the story, they also listen to the English language and when they tell the story, they also practice their spoken English [8]1.
He Huafeng contended that children of various kinds of ages enjoy listening to the stories, which are always full of wonderfulness and goodness. The stories are also apt to arouse their interests and encourage them into pondering and talking [9]1.
Sun Shunping claims that storytelling plays a very important role in the process of our learning. In fact, most of our knowledge, experience and technology are obtained from the stories told by others. Storytelling can also be applied in language learning because of its communicative function [10]2.
3.2 The research of storytelling abroad
3.2.1 Main reasons for exploiting stories:
S.Halliwelletal list eight reasons:
First, stories are motivating and fun. They create a desire to continue learning. Second, stories exercise the imagination helping children develop their own creative powers. Third, stories help children link fantasy with the real world. Fourth, listening to stories is a shared social experience. Children share laughter, sadness, excitement and anticipation. This builds confidence and encourages social and emotional development. Fifth, Children enjoy repeated listening to stories. This encourages language acquisition. Sixth, stories provide a meaningful context for the introduction of new language. Seventh, listening to stories develops listening, comprehension and concentration skills. Eighth, stories create opportunities for continuity in children's learning [11]10.
Nadig also lists a variety of advantages to use stories with young learners of English, such as:
First, stories are fun and foster a positive attitude towards the foreign language. Second, when carefully selected, stories contain comprehensible input that is slightly above the actual language level of children. Third, the children learn words in conte
xt and whole phrases. Fourth, the frequent repetitions in stories help children remember. Fifth, story-based lessons cater to different learning styles and different intelligences. Sixth, the pictures help them guess at the meaning of a text. Seventh, the children realize that they do not have to understand every single word in order to make sense of the story. Eighth, stories trigger their imagination. Ninth, in some stories, the children learn other things besides language (e.g. what animals eat or things about the foreign culture) [12]9.
3.2.2 The relationship between children and stories
Clegg reviewed Realbooks in the primary classroom and suggested there should be more stories in primary ELT. He said that the children love listening to, reading, talking and writing about stories. Stories are therefore a huge motivator for using and learning a second language. He valued that stories comprise everything second language acquisition theorists would like to see in language learning and may act as a springboard for all kinds of cross curricular language use. He also assured that stories reinforce children's ideas of the importance of books in society and reflect children's emotional and social development. Stories are so all-pervasive that people practically cease to be aware of them [13]11.
Wright comments the relationship between children and stories as follows:
We all need stories for our minds as we need food for our bodies. Stories are particularly important in the lives of our children: stories help children to understand their world and share it with others. Children's hunger for stories is constant. Every time they enter the classroom they enter with a need for stories [14]8.
3.2.3 The function of storytelling
McEwan and Egan show that stories form the intellectual and practical nourishment of oral culture and narrative plays a vital role in teaching and learning [15]2.
Dewey claims that stories open the continuous path of reconstructing and recreating the meaning of the world. He also admits as the basic feature of human experience of the world, storytelling has a temporal context, a special context of other people [16]2.
Brunner and Crick contended that a story constructs the outer landscape of action and the inner one of thought and intention. Storytelling gives individuals opportunities to understand others in a social context and clarify their own thinking. Individuals may enrich their own stories of experience and be engaged in mutual interdependence and growth by retelling, rewriting or creating a story [17,18]5.
According to Polkinghorne, the products of our narrative schemes are everywhere in our lives. In another word, our cultural and social environment is full of stories [19]7. He pointed out that man creates narrative descriptions for themselves and for others about their own past actions, and provides storied accounts sensing the behavior of others. He contended people construct imaginative “what if” scenarios to inform their decisions, therefore on the receiving end, people are constantly accepting stories during the conversations or in the written and visual media. He claimed people are told fairy tales as children, and read and discuss stories in school.
4. The positive influence of storytelling on English ability
Storytelling as a way of experiencing the world and as what contain everything second language acquisition theorists would like to see in language learning would arouse more and more teachers' interest and be regarded as one of the most effective ways to be applied into English teaching in the middle school. Storytelling will benefit students, especially young learners in middle schools to shape positive attitudes towards learning English and to improve their English ability.
4.1 Listening ability
In the learning of English, listening is the ability of understanding the native people’s speaking. It is an important part of language ability, and is the main way of obtaining language information. Rivers in 80’s study draws the conclusion that 45% information obtained from listening, 30% from speaking, 16% from reading and 9% from writing. These figures prove that listening takes an important part in the foreign language teaching. For beginners, they have the most opportunity of listening, so it is the easiest to learn. Listening is the foundation and method of developing other language abilities, the development of the listening ability also places the first place. Usually, story transmits to the students in the form of voice in the beginning. Because there is no burden of words, the children would be more willing to accept. However, the teacher how to control the process of listening? After listening, can the students understand?
Kenneth think that listening comprehension consists of five components, that is, dialectical tone, information perception, auditory memory, information decoding, using the learned language to store infor
mation. When carrying on storytelling, teachers can take some measures to help students do better in each section, so as to achieve the aim of improving the students' listening ability. In order to make the students get the correct information quickly when they distinguish the voice, teachers should provide more practice for students to imitate. Especially for students who just start, before learning a story, for the key words they should listen again and again to be familiar with the standard tone of voice and master the basic skill of the pronunciation of the words. When students obtain information, teachers may provide some guidance training. Usually, the language in the story is vivid and interesting. It is attractive to students. Teachers can seize this feature to make the students give the rein to their imagination. At the same time, teachers can make use of abundant expression of gestures and pictures to help students get information as much as possible. In the process of listening, teachers must let the students build confidence, though there are many words their have not heard. Then students will enter the stage of auditory memory. The time of this stage is very short indeed. At this time, teachers can provide some comprehensive training to help students to consolidate this process. A number of judgments or choice against the story will be very useful. In the process of storytelling, teachers often offer some practice against the details. For example, in the process of listening, students should give response to certain key words, or find the exact answer to the question and so on. These activities will help the brain to understand and obtain information. Finally, teachers will provide some memory training to help students express or store the information they have heard. These trainings including repeating the story, telling the story in their own words and so on.
4.2 Speaking ability
Speaking is one of the most basic behaviors of language. It is the oral output and expression of thought. From psycholinguistics' angle, oral expression is a psychological process which the brain controls and deals with the language. Students' concrete thinking ability is better than their abstract thinking ability, therefore the fascinating storytelling offers students context in the classroom and create the language environment for students to communicate with each other. It is helpful to improve students' verbal ability.
Teachers can make full use of the material in the story, such as pictures, slide shows or plays to arouse the interest of the students. This will make students be willing to express their thought against the context and discover the delight of speaking.
1) Speaking against pictures
Teachers use the pictures of the story to inspire students to practice speaking, and let the students contact the content of the pictures in English, thus it provides a very good opportunity for students to practice oral English. Pictures can draw out the plot of the story conveniently; meanwhile they lead students to the context and give students some space for imagination. In practice, teachers should encourage the students continually and confirm their achievement, even if they can only recall a few key words of the story. Teachers can help the students to complement the story and make the students review the interesting plot of the story when they are in the process of practice.
2) Role play
This is the most expectable activity for students. They can integrate themselves into the story and add their own emotions to the story. Teachers control the relationship between playing and speaking. They should make well preparation before role play, for example, they should make sure that the students can express the words and sentences which they have already mastered proficiently. As for the students who do not have a solid foundation and have difficulty in speaking, they also have a strong desire to play. At that time if the teachers guide properly, they can motivate these students to learn.
3) Retelling the story
Retelling the story is a commonly used way to develop students' ability of speaking. It is a good way to develop students' ability of oral expression, thinking and listening. Before carrying on this activity, students should master a certain words and sentences, because the output of the language is based on the input of certain information. Therefore this activity is suitable for the junior middle students other than the primary students for they do not learn enough words and sentences, they can just repeat the story. Repeating stories is also a good way to learn English. Repeating proficiently can provide students with a certain accumulation of language material, which is helpful to develop students' ability of speaking and writing.
4.3 Reading ability
Reading is a behavior to understand and absorb the written information. Reading is a psychological process of the brain processes and understands the
meaning of the information. Reading can not only help students obtain information, broaden their horizons, absorb knowledge and enhance students' interest of learning English, but also expand their vocabulary ,develop their ability of thinking, analyzing and understanding. As for the junior middle school students, although the vocabularies they mastered are limited，the storytelling can offer them not only text symbols, colorful pictures but also a number of games which will help them understand the story. It is very important to develop the junior middle school students' reading ability.
Reading is a process for the students to experience the language after the story has been presented to them. On the one hand, with the cooperation of voice students can have a better understanding of the emotional expression of the story, on the other hand when the students are reading they have to use their eyes, mouth, ears and brain at the same time which helps the students understand, recall and be helpful to develop their sense of English. When students are reading, teachers can play some proper music to let them read with the music. Reading with the music will be able to stimulate the students' excitement and make them be more interested in their reading material. More often, teachers will adopt role reading this method to guide students to imagine the scene of the materials and realize the mood and the tone of the role they are playing.
4.4 Writing ability
Writing is also one of the basic activities of language; it is a communication behavior to express the thought through words. Writing is a language activity which people use words and symbols to record, transmit information and express their thought. The training of writing is an essential link of the storytelling teaching. In order to develop the students' writing ability, teachers can organize some activities such as writing against pictures, cooperative writing. Through these activities, teachers can make students work together to make up their weakness of their poor vocabularies and life experience. The students will feel that they have something to write and writing in English becomes easier.
The method of writing against pictures can be used before or after learning the story. If it is used before learning the story, teachers can present the pictures to the students. Teachers can help students start the story with vocabularies. First, teachers collect the vocabularies the students can image with the pictures, then let students use these vocabularies to make sentences, finally make the students use these sentences to make short passage. This method is easy to operate and can be very effective in training students' writing ability. If this method is used after learning the story teachers can also help students organize language according to such steps and they should encourage their students to arouse their imagination to complement the plot which did not happen in the story. This can enrich students' writing content and stimulate their interest of using English.
Cooperative writing is also a very practical form of learning English. However this form often takes after class. Teachers can use the story which students have already learned to ask them to complement the story or continue the story. After assigning the task, teachers can divide the students into several groups and guide them to complete the story. Each student writes one or two sentences, and then they put their sentences together and make a short story. This activity requires students to have better learning initiative, conscientiousness and a strong ability of learning. There is more space for students to reflect their learning potential when they are creating the story. In the process of guiding, teachers should emphasis the importance of cooperation. This will not only help the students of different levels to have the opportunity to training, but also be helpful to the development of the non-intelligence factors of the students.
5. Data presentation and discussion
5.1 Data presentation
A questionnaire to investigate the students' preferences between teaching the course book loyally and storytelling teaching method has been addressed to some 40 students who are learning English in Heng gang middle school. According to the data collection, the students' perceptions, attitudes toward and preferences for storytelling and the students' possible expectations or suggestion on classroom teaching of English, become distinctly clear to us. We could see students' views on learning English.
According to the results of statistics, in answering Question 1, about 25 percent of the students claim that they like the form of the English teaching, 25 percent say they do not like while 50 percent of students do not mind. For Question 2, 30 percent are willing to take part in imitating activities in created situations.25 percent tend to learn a second language with watching VCD.45 percent prefer to lear
n English by listening to stories while nobody is willing to study English with the form of singing. Obviously, students' interests vary as well as their learning styles. However, these numbers reflect that students love to learn a foreign language with certain context, especially stories, and in interesting or challenging ways. As for the desired learning content of a foreign language in Question 3, 10 percent prefer dialogues, 15 percent prefer poetry. Concerning stories and jokes they fall into 45 percent and 30 percent respectively. This may result from students' different learning styles and other individual characters.
Question 4 and Question 5 reflect that stories are what in common students' preference for contents are. Most of them love stories no matter in what language they are. If the contents are in a second language, the number of students who love stories increase to 50 percent while the number of students who prefer to books about science declines to 10 percent. It is partly because the content is difficult for them to understand or appreciate and partly because books about science in a second language for students are not paid attention to well or finely and interestingly adapted for them.
When talking about listening to stories in Question 6, 75 percent claim that they like to listen to stories and 25 percent say that they do not mind listening to stories. However, when being asked if they are willing to tell a story in English, there are 10 percent who are willing to, 70 percent who are not willing to and 20 percent who do not mind telling a story in class as is stated in Question 7. Comparatively in Question 8, 25 percent admit that they could imitate the teacher and write a similar story and 50 percent think that they could not imitate the teacher and tell a similar while 25 percent are uncertain about it. In Question9, 80 percent of the students claim that they like learning English with storytelling while 20 percent do not mind.
Data from the questionnaire：
Items A B C D
Do you like the traditional way of English teaching? Like Dislike Do not mind
25% 25% 50%
Which are your favorite form of learning English? Watch VCD Listen to stories imitation singing
25% 45% 30% 0
Which form of English contents are your most like to learn? Dialogue Poetry Story Joke
10% 15% 45% 30%
Which are your favorite reading book of Chinese? Story book Science book Poetry History
40% 20% 15% 25%
Which are your favorite reading book of English? Story book Science book Poetry History
50% 10% 20% 20%
If the teacher tells an English story in every class, are you willing to listen? Yes No Do not mind
75% 0 25%
If the teacher give you some time to tell a story in every class, are you willing to tell? Yes No Do not mind
10% 70% 20%
If the teacher tells an English story in every class, are you able to write a similar story? Yes No Are not sure
25% 50% 25%
Do you like the form of storytelling teaching in learning English? Yes No Do not mind
80% 0 20%
5.2 Discussion
So, according to the data collected from the questionnaire, the conclusion will be that most of the students perceive that stories are important in learning and they love stories. They hold positive attitudes toward stories but they prefer to listen to stories instead of telling stories. The students expect and suggest more stories or interesting contents in classroom when teaching of English. Most of us view that students do not have psychological drawbacks and are happy to communicate with or speak English, however they are in fact lack of confidence in learning a second language. At the same time, they are uncertain about the learning strategies. They dislike the fact that teachers teach the course book literally. In fact, some of the teachers in China have also realized the effectiveness and efficiency of telling stories not included by course books and they are applying stories to class teaching now.
6. Conclusion
Obviously almost all the educationalists and practitioners hold a positive attitude towards stories and believe stories benefit children or young learners greatly. They value stories highly. Therefore it's meaningful to apply stories into English teaching and learning. On the basis of what has been discussed above, it could be concluded that as a young learner, learning or acquisition of a foreign or second language means little difference. The content of learning will be of great importance. Stories not only satisfy the young learners psychologically and physiologically, but provide contexts for understanding the culture, which will generate positive attitude to the second language and provide the context for memorizing words and phrases and so on, as well as a basis for further learning. Stories contribute to language proficiency development. Stories provide a variety of advantages for young learners to have access to individual suitable ways of learning and offer more possibilities of applying the language to practice. Storytelling makes natural acquisition and forma
l conscious learning possible at the same time. It creates opportunities to use the target language meaningfully and therefore guarantees a more satisfactory result of foreign language teaching. Hence, storytelling is crucial and essential to students’ learning a second language. As we know, the students of various kinds of ages enjoy listening to the stories，which are always full of wonderfulness and goodness. The stories are also apt to arouse their interests and encourage them into pondering and talking. In a word, to use storytelling as a teaching method is to treat English teaching as a whole, a body with flesh and blood, not simple pouring of fragments of words, sentences and grammar. Under this teaching practice, the author believes that students will be more interested in English, and the author also believes that storytelling will improve students' synthetic abilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing and to establish a kind of attractive study and life for them.
Acknowledgements
My initial thanks go to my supervisor Lou Qing, who patiently supervised my dissertation and was at times very willing to offer me illuminating advice or suggestions. Without her help, I could not have finished this dissertation.
I am also indebted to other teachers and my classmates who have not only offered me their warm encouragements but also shared with me their ideas and books. They are Huang Feifei, Lu Ye, Wu Yan, and many others.
My greatest personal debt is to my parents, who have cultivated a soul of sensitivity, hospitality, and honesty out of me, and offered a harbor of happiness and sweetness for me.
The remaining weakness and possible errors of the dissertation are entirely my own.
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