A Story-Based Approach To Teach Foreign Languages: The Case Of English

This study scrutinizes the effectiveness and feasibility of a story-based language teaching in Moroccan EFL classrooms. In doing so, a quasi-experimental mixed method was adopted and sample of 80 common core students were randomly selected and put into experimental and control groups. The experimental group was exposed to story-based lessons whose source of input was stories while the control group was exposed to lessons from the ministry EFL textbook. To assess the impact of this approach, a student questionnaire and a classroom observation were also used. The results revealed that the experimental group performed better in proficiency tests than the control group. A statistically significant difference between the experimental and the control group was observed. A positive change in motivation to learn the language was also noticed during classroom observations. The results also showed a positive difference in grammar scores concerning the structure taught via stories. Therefore, the findings in general, proved that the use of story-based language teaching can boost the students’ grammar knowledge along with the students' eagerness to read more stories. Some students even started using some vocabulary items and chunks in their production be it speaking or writing.