Teaching Listening and Speaking to Young Learners Through Folktales

Folktale is an interesting subject to be taught to young learners. This is one of the effective ways to make young learners easier to understand English. Folktales (Balinese short stories for children) are written with pictures, therefore, they are more interested to be learnt by young learners. Picture books have been used as an effective aid for teaching folktales because they cover beautiful language, have rhythmic refrains and repetitive sentence patterns. During the listening lesson, students are given pictures books (content stories) and occasionally they are set to listen to CDs. These strategies have been applied in teaching young learners at Saraswati primary school year V (five) in Denpasar Bali. After the strategies have been applied for one semester, they show significant improvement on the progress of the students in acquiring the listening and speaking skills. This can be observed through the progress of the results on their tests of either listening or speaking.