The Application Of Storytelling Approach To English Vocabulary Teaching In Primary School

Vocabulary is the indispensable building material of language,and any language skills cannot exist independently without lexical elements.Students’ vocabulary proficiency will largely affect the overall English proficiency.The Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard in 2011 has put forward higher requirements for English teaching.In this study,the author tries to introduce storytelling approach into English vocabulary teaching in primary school with the aims of further improving the effectiveness of English vocabulary teaching.Storytelling approach is a way to enable students to learn and memorize vocabulary naturally through listening,reading,telling,performing,making up the story,etc.According to the primary school students’ learning interest and cognitive level,storytelling approach conforms to the students’ psychological and language learning characteristics.The storytelling approach embodies the concept of student centered and allows students to actively participate in the construction of knowledge.It plays an important role in cultivating students’ interest in learning English,understanding and memorizing English vocabulary.Based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis,Affective Filter Hypothesis and Swain’s Output Hypothesis,the study attempts to figure out whether storytelling approach has a positive impact on the English vocabulary teaching in primary school through the teaching experiment.Accordingly,this paper tries to answer the following two questions:(1)Can the application of storytelling approach to vocabulary teaching in primary school improve students’ English vocabulary achievements?(2)What are the attitudes of primary school students towards storytelling approach?The teaching experiment considers the students of Grade Four in a town of Gansu Province primary school as research subjects.The experimental class and the control class were all 40 students.At the beginning of the study,students’ English and vocabulary level in two classes were similar according to the results of pre-test.Then,the two classes used different teaching methods to experiment with the same teaching materials.The storytelling approach was adopted in the experimental class,while the control class used the 3P model(presentation,practice,production).The entire experiment lasted for nearly eight weeks.Finally,the experimental results were tested by tests,questionnaires and interviews.According to the results of data analysis,the experimental results show that the storytelling approach can contribute effectively to improving English vocabulary teaching in primary schools.The storytelling approach can stimulate students’ interest in learning English.The vast majority of students keep theaccepted and supportive attitude towards this teaching method.The results also demonstrate that storytelling approach can effectively improve the students’ English vocabulary achievements.Based on the analysis of the experiment results,some implications and limitations are proposed based on major findings in the last chapter,as well as the outlook for future research.At last,it is hoped that educators can do more in-depth research on storytelling approach combined with teaching practice,and provide more creative and practical suggestions for the application of storytelling approach in English teaching.