Children love stories, because they are associated with pleasure. They are used to listening to their mothers and fathers telling them interesting, exciting stories with unexpected endings.

Using stories in the classroom also can be very motivating. In addition, we can use stories for developing and practicing different skills and language for different topics. There’s one more reason why we should use stories. It’s educational. Every story contains a message we’d like to transfer to the listener. There are a lot of opportunities for personalisation: expressing attitudes, comparing with children’s own experience, etc.

Action stories, besides being motivating, versatile and educational, meet children’s demand to be physically active. Children have an insatiable desire to move around. In the classroom we suppress this desire and ask them to sit still, stop fidgeting, fold their arms and not move them. We wrongly assume that unless children are sitting still, looking at the teacher, they are not learning.

The Total Physical Response (TPR) theory suggests that we learn language items most successfully if we associate them with physical movements. The theory contains a series of powerful techniques developed by Dr James Asher linking language to physical movements. The ideas behind TPR are connected with our natural ‘body language’ and the idea of kinaesthetic memory.