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How do you think a person starts acquiring words and languages and why do you think toddlers can easily learn and speak a language they often hear even though it has not been their mother tongue? This is because the human brain has been designed to analyze and be stimulated by a sound, connect visual situations that are in line with that sound and try to produce meaning for that particular sound in a trial and error process. And here is where the wonders of a repetitive, illustrated storytelling come in. Listening to a story that’s being told or read to you activates the auditory cortex of your brain while engaging with a story also fires up your left temporal cortex, the region that is receptive to language. According to raising children.net, language development in 1-2 years is amazing. Your child starts understanding what you say, by two, you can partly understand what she says too. At 2-3 years, language development in children is about lots of new words, longer sentences, clearer speech and a better understanding of what people say. During this stage, if parents and teachers increase story-telling to children of this age group, they will develop the important skills of listening and critical thinking because children tend not only to hear but to pay attention to listening and thinking. In addition, children learn coherent conjunctions as well as stresses by mimicking the reader’s voice and what had been said. In schools where improving basic literacy levels is a priority, storytelling can be used to quickly raise standards while developing skills, knowledge, and confidence in a range of other areas. Another advantage of listening to stories is that children grow in academic learning. Storytelling introduces a lot of new vocabulary to children. At home, people communicate with a limited number of words. But stories will have an academic level vocabulary and a lot of newer words for the kid to learn. It is easy to teach the meanings of the words as kids learn faster from the context of the story. Teachers and parents need to take care of certain aspects when reading out stories for children. If you want kids to listen actively and understand the story, you have to read out the stories emotionally. Change the pitch of sound according to the feelings and emotions depicted in the story. Use effective body language to convey ideas in an exact way. Perfect storytelling is acting out a story. Storytelling parents are found to have a more emotional bond with the children. It teaches children to have creative thoughts and actions. Furthermore, listening involves the intake of information. Martha Hamilton and Mitch Weiss found that when children listen to stories, they forget the mechanics of reading. They just enjoy the pure pleasure of the language and imagine it. However, they point out that, by listening, children can feel what it would like to be to read fluently hence, they become a better reader and a skilled speaker. In conclusion, story-telling is a powerful tool for language literacy, especially in the early childhood stage. Through story-telling, children acquire the pieces of information from the sound of a word, analyze visual information associated with that sound and try to produce meaning for that particular sound in a trial and error process. In this way, they can learn English naturally and fast.
