Consider the following two stories:
Story #1: Once upon a time, there was a wobbly-kneed Giraffe who wanted nothing more than to boogie with some friends at an extravagant Jungle Dance. The golden hues of sunset and lush colours of the Congolian Rainforest made his home a sight to behold; yet tonight, all eyes were on Gerald and his cringey dance moves. He was embarrassed. Alone. And he was desperately in need of a friendly cricket to teach him how to dance to the beat of his own drum. Under the pensive silver light of a full moon, will Gerald muster the courage to take the spotlight at the party?
Story #2: Once upon a time, there was a language called English that wanted nothing more than to be mastered and spoken correctly during an important examination. English was a serious fellow, and offered a series of grammatical and lexical exercises to help people understand him. In this story, English doesn’t change and there aren’t any other characters or colourful jungle landscapes.
Which story would you prefer to read? How did the plot summaries make you feel?
“But Story #2 doesn’t have a plot!” You might say. Touché. Story #2 is my best attempt at sprucing up the idea of an English Language Textbook. That being said, just because they lack compelling plotlines doesn’t mean that stodgy textbooks aren’t telling a story about what English is. For many of us, they spin a story about English being an effortful, academic, and accuracy-focused mental puzzle. Within that story are many more spin-offs we tell ourselves about our aptitude at completing said puzzle and the stakes for getting things wrong.
“Okay, I prefer Story #1, but it isn’t about English!” Sure, technically Story #1 is about a Giraffe. But in the context of Casita de Inglés, it tells a story about English, too; it characterizes the language as a source of curiousity, imagination, and interesting moral reasoning for our kids.
In textbooks, I imagine English as a know-it-all character who sees everything in black-and-white, right-and-wrong. With storybooks, I see English as more of an eccentric artist, whose abstract paintings you like to admire even when you might only understand the broad strokes of their meaning.
Storytelling in the English classroom has been shown to be more motivating, engaging, and understandable for young learners compared to traditional textbooks (Lucarevschi, 2016). They introduce kids to rhythm and rhyme, present new words in the context of how they might be used, and allow kids to associate potentially abstract ideas with concrete images that were designed to capture their attention (Škarić & Salhab, 2025).
For example, take Gerald the Giraffe’s “wobbly” knees. Even I, as a native English speaker, would have a hard time explaining “wobbly” without a picture to drive the point home. I could stand up and stumble around the classroom to demonstrate, but I’d be at risk of confusing the concept of “wobbly knees” with “Teacher Luke’s silly antics.” A picture’s worth a thousand words, and in this case, it might save me from a knee replacement down the line!
Another reason why storybooks work so well for language acquisition is because they get kids talking and telling their own stories. Dialogic reading (the method of turning a book into a back-and-forth interactive conversation) has been shown to boost young learner’s vocabulary and language creativity over time (Hui et al., 2020). In other words, not only do kids pick up more words, they also become more capable of finding funny, niche ways to describe things (e.g. “I am feeling WOBBLY today”).
When I’m reading a storybook to my students, I like to put dialogic reading into action by asking comprehension questions that relate to the words and phrases we’ve already learned in class, like:
“Which animal is your favourite at the Jungle Party?”
“How is Gerald the Giraffe feeling today? Angry, or embarrassed?”
And best of all, “What’s going to happen next?”
Young kids are often surprisingly good at making predictions about these storybooks, even if sometimes they only communicate their predictions with body language (Havron et al., 2019). As they are listening to a story, young learners’ brains become primed for absorbing new vocabulary in real-time: children as young as three or four years old already tend to differentiate between verbs and nouns based on the sentence structures that precede them (Havron et al., 2018).
A great feature of children’s books is that after reading enough of them, most readers know when to expect an extravagant failure or an extravagant success. If students can make a prediction based on the structure of a story, then by the time they encounter new vocabulary, they’ve already been searching for how best to describe the situation in the book. In “Giraffes Can’t Dance,” my Hunny Bunnies already know that Gerald will feel embarrassed by the way all of the animals are laughing at him; thus, when I introduce this word, it’s a much smaller jump for them to comprehend what it means.
Another great feature of children’s books is that they almost always contain a “moral of the story.” In her 2016 theory on the factors that promote well-being among language learners, Rebecca Oxford devised the EMPATHICS model, which largely matches the kinds of positive psychology themes within children’s books:
Empathy
Motivation
Perseverance
Agency
Time management
Habits of Mind
Imagination
Character Strengths
Self-confidence
Unpacking each of these “morals of the story” would take some time, but we can already see a few of them in what little we know about Gerald the Giraffe! In his story, we’re encouraged to empathize with Gerald’s embarrassment, observe his perseverance in the face of said embarrassment, and see how his self confidence grows when he’s willing to accept that he’s allowed to be different from everyone else (spoiler alert!).
By bringing this kind of social-emotional learning into the English classroom at a young age, we’re changing the narrative about language-learning that kids grow up with. English becomes a meaningful lens through which kids learn about themselves and the world, rather than an academic subject to be mastered for external validation.
Reading isn’t just for young learners. I, a native speaker of English, am sometimes still stumped with vocabulary I encounter in the books I read. For example, a murder-mystery featuring a particularly suspicious butler taught me that the word “obsequious” meant to be excessively obedient (and decisively did NOT mean to possess a large volume of shiny “sequin” fabrics, which was my natural assumption). More recently, R.F. Kuang’s anti-colonial fantasy novel Babel taught me that vituperate means to strongly blame or insult someone (let’s hope I’ll never have to use it again).
The point is, reading is for everyone at all ages and stages of language learning. As we close out this week’s theme of learning about books, now is a great time for a bedtime story in English! At Casita we offer the option for enrolled students to borrow books from our schools, and you can read more about our library here. Plus, if you’re looking for a peek into how we do things, you can check out our YouTube Playlist featuring Casita teachers reading English storybooks out loud!
Happy reading everyone!
References
Andreae, G., & Parker-Rees, G. (1999). Giraffes Can’t Dance. Orchard Books London.
Havron, N., de Carvalho, A., Fiévet, A.-C., & Christophe, A. (2019). Three- to four-year-old children rapidly adapt their predictions and use them to learn novel word meanings. Child Development, 90(1), 82–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13113
Hui, A. N., Chow, B. W.-Y., Chan, E. S., & Leung, M.-T. (2019). Reading picture books with elements of positive psychology for enhancing the learning of English as a second language in young children. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02899
Lucarevschi, C. R. (2016). The role of storytelling on language learning: A literature review. Working Papers of the Linguistic Circle of the University of Victoria, 26(1). https://doi.org/https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/WPLC/article/view/15309
Oxford, R. (2016). Toward a psychology of well-being for language learners: The ‘empathics’ vision. In Positive Psychology in SLA (pp. 10–89).
Škarić, H., & Salhab, M. (2025). The impact of reading on children’s cognitive and Language Development. MAP Education and Humanities, 5(1), 37–50. https://doi.org/10.53880/2744-2373.2024.5.37