Once Upon a Time: An Integrated Approach to Teaching the English Language in the KBSR (Part I)

Abstract

‘Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.’
John Ruskin, The Lamp of Memory

Through stories, children are drawn into the lives and experiences of fictional characters. This imaginative involvement gives them opportunities for reflecting on their own lives and for learning to understand their personal hopes and fears, conflicts and predicaments. The imaginative content also helps learners to order and structure reality. This has important implications for the primary school curriculum, which stresses imaginative contemplation as well as the transmission of facts and information. Stories present particular opportunities for learners to order experiences and to make sense of them through reflection and reinterpretation. The important general and over-arching point is that engaging with story provides learners with opportunities for imaginative reflection, provides access to experiences which in real life may be denied, and provides a meaningful context for language to operate naturally.