How storytelling can work as a pedagogy to facilitate children’s English as a foreign language learning

Storytelling has a long tradition in education including language learning and teaching because of its extensive benefits in language development. In second and foreign language education, stories and storytelling have been integrated into school curricula to enhance language development; however, there is scarce empirical evidence about how storytelling facilitates children’s English as a foreign language (EFL) learning and its potential as a holistic pedagogy. This article explores a living educational theory (Whitehead multimodal scaffolding; mutual inspiration; and a linguistic model. Each of these elements is explained with illustrative examples from the storytelling workshops.