Storytelling in Primary School: A Study on the Challenges and Its Effectiveness for Vocabulary Acquisition in English as a FL

Long before the appearance of writing, storytelling served as a means of transmitting values, knowledge, and culture. This thesis aims to investigate, through field research, the positive outcomes, and challenges of using storytelling for vocabulary acquisition in first-grade students learning English as a foreign language. The first part of the study will be theoretically driven, starting from an introduction of a few notable figures renowned for their storytelling capabilities and finally shifting to the pedagogic value of narration, also describing specific approaches, strategies, and methods to help primary school students familiarise with English as a foreign language. The second part will be devoted to the fieldwork research, based upon a communicative approach with activities focused on lexical repetition to learn and reinforce new terms. In particular, the final chapter will focus on the analysis of the data collected – obtained using subjective and objective methods– from which the actual effectiveness of the project will be delineated, with consideration of the challenges encountered and the actual vocabulary acquired by the pupils. Lastly, the final purpose of the research is to broaden the literature in light of future research that investigates storytelling to increase vocabulary in children’s language education, emphasising potential difficulties that could arise and ultimately jeopardise the validity of the outcomes.