In nowadays society, whose economy, science technology and many other aspects develop fast, people all around the world get closer and closer. More and more people in China would like to choose to go abroad to enjoy their vacations, and also buy commodity and cosmetics of good quality, etc. So when people go to foreign countries, there comes a gap of communication, which is that foreigners cannot speak Chinese, and most of them can just speak English. On the other hand, our world is becoming and has been a globalized world. English is a worldwide speaking language. As a consequence, learning English seems to be a necessary task, which is coincident with what we have learnt for many years, that is, the curriculum of English since Grade 3 in public schools.
The New National English Curriculum Standards (2013: 2) has put forward that English curriculum of compulsory education owns the dual character of both instrumental and humanistic. For the former one, English curriculum has the obligation to cultivate students’ basic English literacy and develop students’ thinking ability, in other words, throughout the process of learning English, students can master the basic knowledge of English pronunciation, develop basic skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing and preliminarily form the ability to communicate with others in English, thus laying the foundations of learning English and other related scientific and cultural knowledge in future study.
The task of English curriculum in elementary education, according to The New National English Curriculum Standards (2013:2), is to evoke and cultivate students’ learning interest, help students build their confidence, form good learning habit and effective learning strategies, develop the ability of independent learning and spirit of cooperation, guide students grasp English basic knowledge and skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, develop language integrated competence, foster students’ observation, memory, thinking, imagination and creativity, help students understand the world and raise across-culture awareness, etc.
English teaching in primary school should provide students with both explicit communicative language activities and intrinsic thinking language activity. Only by integrating these two can English teaching be more excellent. Throughout the process of English teaching, students are expected to not only understand and grasp the knowledge, but also use what they have learned flexibly. Some studies show that storytelling can help students in these two aspects. Storytelling contains two parts, which we call them understanding and using. While listening to or reading stories, students are to understand what stories are about; while telling stories, students are to apply learned words and sentence structures. In this way, they can improve their oral English naturally.
R. Gardner and W. Lambert (1969) state in their research, the most successful learners are those who not only are talented, but also own great learning motivation (Ye, 2011). To pupils, only those which can excite their interests can produce their desire and motivation of learning. Story is included. There are a great number of vivid characters, fascinating plots and so forth in stories. The primary objective proposed in The New English Curriculum Standards (2013:4) is to cultivate students’ interests in learning English. Overall, story teaching can be a strong power in primary school.
Language must be learned to help with learners understanding and comprehension. Language learning needs adequate input and requires high demand of output on the account that cognitive levels of students and their opportunities of learning English are not the same. Story telling does not imprison students at the starting line. Stories are full of interesting and funny points and imagination, and some stories are related to students’ life experience. As a result, storytelling can be a powerful way and approach of learning English and most importantly, speaking English. 小学故事教学对英语口语教学的影响(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_66060.html