Stories are at the heart of Comprehensible Input strategies. Here’s a lovely explanation and rationale for stories from contemporary educational philosopher, Kieran Egan:
Stories work by embedding their contents into vivid events and images that carry strong emotional colouring. These events and images are organized between a beginning, which typically sets up a binary conflict that is then elaborated though vivid characters and events, and an end, which resolves the conflict. The memory technique we know as the story has survived to play somewhat different psychological roles for us. But in its original forms in oral cultures it has played and continues to play a vital social function.
Information with high emotional
colouring within a story is much more
easily remembered by humans than is
a random list.
Here’s the beginning of our story list: