Keyword: «narrative arc»

Storytelling is known to have officially infiltrated educational contexts several decades ago, even though it has always been an integral part of educational activities: people telling each other stories in order to share information. Storytelling has proven to be an efficient teaching method, enabling educators to achieve a variety of goals, from learning bits of vocabulary and grammar to developing students’ creative thinking and communicative skills. This article gives a short overview of the theoretical foundations of this teaching method, explores the benefits of implementing it in EFL contexts, and reveals the findings of our first research on storytelling.

EFL instructors have been utilising storytelling as a teaching method to reach a variety of goals: from developing language skills to stimulating students’ motivation and fostering their creative thinking. Irrespective of the goals that EFL instructors set for the lesson, students also develop storytelling skills and gain an intuitive understanding of how the various narrative arcs work. In this article, we expand on our previous research on sto-rytelling in EFL contexts. The article describes the interactive workshop that was conduct-ed for EFL university students with the aim of obtaining more data on their understanding of the narrative arcs and discovering whether they see storytelling as an important skill to develop.