Storytelling is the oldest form of education. Cultures around the world have always told tales as a way of transmitting their values and traditions from generation to generation. Since entertainment nowadays is characterized by high speed, instant gratification and flashes of visual impact, it seems almost impossible to find the time, pause and pace necessary to listen to a story. Paradoxically, there is an intense revival of this ancient practice. Why? Simply because storytelling is linked to very basic human needs: the needs for care and share.

But, why would EFL teachers embrace the art of storytelling? Why wouldn’t they read a story or just let the students read it, instead?
Research affirms that storytelling enhances organizational skills as well as all aspects of language development. Since they cater for both hemispheres of the brain, stories are powerful and efficient teaching tools. Students usually store the tales told to them in their long-term memory. More often than not, they also remember the vocabulary contained in those stories.

I would like to share with you my experience as a storyteller in L2. Almost on a daily basis, I visit schools and institutions with my Stories in a Bag performances. And there I am, on an uncrowded stage, library or classroom, not only engaging the listeners but also entrancing and inspiring them with my stories. During a storytelling session, students are not passively leaning back, receiving things already done for them. On the contrary, they are actively involved conjuring up their own mental images from the words they listen to. They are working along with me, creating their own hypotheses of how the story will unfold.
When I find a story that I like so much that a need to tell it emerges, I work through a process to make it my own. What I do to “implant” a story in my system is to imagine it fully, in a variety of sensory modes. I resort to my visual, auditory and kinesthetic fields. Once I have explored each scene deeply, I have a lot of information instantly available for the moment of telling the tale. This by no means implies that the audience will see, hear and feel the same imagery as my internal representations. Each and every listener will construct their unique internal images, based on their individual previous experiences and memory recall. And this is inevitably done by students all ages (from young learners to adults) when exposed to a story “on its feet”.

Oral language, then, forms a bridge between the images in the mind of the teller and those in the minds of the audience:

To achieve this, one of my major premises is to produce little text which can irradiate endless images.  Moreover, I carefully choose what to say and what to silence, so that various modes of imagery are called for and listeners fill in gaps of missing information with their own inner representations and possibilities. Needless to say, it is the magic of this diversity which I celebrate together with the audience in each performance.
Eloquence, therefore, is evenly divided between the storyteller and the listeners. Thus, attention is deeply captured and conditions that are highly conducive to learning are established.

A storyteller of a foreign language is simultaneously the editor, director and performer of his material. He makes use of his creativity and commitment so as to offer a version of the story that is both comprehensible and enjoyable for the listeners. Apart from linguistic issues, he makes decisions as regards levels of protagonism and the distribution of the text among the narrator and the characters. He shifts from character to teller, from teller to character and from character to character, relying on multidimensional resources, such as: body posture, facial expression, tone of voice, rhythm and pace, use of silence and spatial orientation. In his plain outfit, this narrator will do what it takes to make believe the story is actually taking place. As I usually say in my workshops, it is a fantastic game of “I tell you lies, and you pretend you believe them”. After all, telling tales means telling lies, doesn’t it?

Storytelling, either in a foreign language or in the mother tongue, is at the core of teaching and learning. It is an instance of heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul communication. Telling a story allows the teacher to have more eye contact with the student and increases the sensitivity between storyteller and listener. Enhancing his storytelling skills will increase the teacher’s ability to affect those students he has not been able to reach before.
Experience has demonstrated that, once a story is felt, then are the students ready and willing to do any kind of internalizing.