It will not be necessary to make the child or group of children feel that the story is being used as a lesson in English.
Just select the right story.
Tell it over and over again, as long as the children are interested in it—and you will find that their interest will exhaust yours.
And encourage the children to tell the story with you.
This method spells success in using the story to increase a child’s vocabulary.
Certain stories stimulate the child to repeat certain jingles or phrases with the story teller. This explains their popularity and adds to their value. The good old cumulative story of the “Cat and the Mouse” is built around a nonsense ditty:
“First she leaped, and then she ran,
’Till she came to the cow and thus began.”
After a child learns and repeats this verse he begins to add to it the sentences of the story that precede and follow it. When the foreign child is able to tell the last paragraph of the story:—
“So the good baker gave the mouse some bread; the mouse gave the bread to the butcher who gave him some meat; the mouse gave the meat to the farmer who gave him an armful of hay; the mouse gave the hay to the cow and the cow gave the mouse a saucer of milk for the cat. Then the cat drank the milk and gave the mouse his little long tail. And they went on playing in the malt house.”