Teaching English Pronunciation through Storytelling Approach

Abstract

To improve the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language, teachers can use myriads of pedagogical tools such as poems, idioms, proverbs, and stories to provide learners with the opportunity to build a cultural knowledge of the target language and gain fruitful results. Indeed, storytelling can be taken as a funny source of information for pupils in middle and secondary schools and even at the university level for EFL learners since giving much importance to the traditional teaching of pronunciation and grammar rules makes the learning process boring. At this stage, learners need to know more about the culture of the foreign language and how to develop their four linguistic skills, mainly speaking and listening. To this vein, the rationale of the current research paper is to explore teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards the use of storytelling approach in teaching the English language. Ultimately, another concern of this research paper is to promote an inkle eye on whether the use of storytelling is beneficial in creating an enjoyable atmosphere, improving the four linguistic skills, mainly pronunciation and developing the students’ cultural awareness of the target language or not. To fulfil this claim, this research work gives an in-depth look on teaching by using a storytelling-based approach through approaching a systematic analysis based on a questionnaire, an interview and a test. The researcher selected 80 EFL students from the first-year level at Saida University. To this end, the findings revealed that both teachers and students believe that the introduction of storytelling in learning a foreign language may improve their vocabulary acquisition and understanding of the cultural dimensions between the target language and their own. The analysis showed that students have improved their pronunciation of some English vowels and consonants. The results also demonstrated that through practical sessions students enjoy learning English pronunciation.