Using Stories to Teach Languages

Children's books, fairy tales, and invented storytelling are fun and effective for teaching French, Spanish, German, ESL, and more.

Stories are powerful. When you tap into the magic of a great story, language comes alive. With retellings, hunks of functional language make leaps from the page into your students' everyday vocabulary. The brain holds on more dearly to the language it encounters in the form of a story because it is contextual, and often visual and emotional, too.

Classic, familiar fairy tales are great for narrating, pantomiming, performing with dialogue, reading, illustrating, writing, and re-writing with a twist. Some of my favorites are The Three Little Pigs, The Three Bears, and The Little Red Hen. I've even used The Three Bears with my Level II high school French students to teach the difference between passé composé and the imperfect verb tenses.

A technique I've dabbled in, but haven't fully developed, is TPRS. TPRS, an input-based methodology originated by Blaine Ray, used to stand for "Total Physical Response Storytelling," but it has been more appropriately titled "Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling." Visit TPRStorytelling for more information.

Here is a resource of Suite101 articles about using children's books for the teaching of foreign languages. I hope it sparks some ideas for using stories and pictures books. And don't forget the goldmine of possibilities in literature from the target culture. Once upon a time, there was . . .

• The Very Hungry Caterpillar (book by Eric Carle)
• Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? (book by Bill Martin and Eric Carle)
• The Grouchy Ladybug (book by Eric Carle)
• Learn French With Children's Books
• Create Foreign Language Stories