Abstract
Reading encouragement is a transversal subject present throughout the entire educational stage of any student from early childhood education through primary education to Secondary Education and higher education. In this chapter, the authors intersperse the pleasure of reading in another language (English) and the reflection on the values transmitted by each of the selected stories. The main purpose is to teach a list of values to students in primary education but using this selection of stories as a basis to reach the internalization of these values. We cannot forget that they are still children and that we have to adapt the contents and learning channels to their evolutionary stage. By using fantastic characters, the concepts are extrapolated in a different way, making it easier for children to internalize the values. Therefore, the main objective of this work is to implement a didactic proposal based on the use of stories in English for values education in a group of children in the fifth grade of primary school.
TopIntroduction
When we are young, stories are an essential part of our lives. Adults entertain us with stories of various kinds, with characters we want to be like or, on the contrary, avoid being like. Real or fantastic stories deal with a wide range of subjects. Generally, these short stories are used to lull us to sleep, distract us. At the same time, we eat, take us away from the television or modern electronic devices, and keep us quiet and attentive, even if only to the voice of the person reading or narrating them to us (Adela Johan, 2013).
However, can stories have more uses, and can we learn from them? There is no right or wrong answer, everything is correct if well-founded, justified, and contextualized. Hence, following this maxim, we will make the most of the usefulness of stories. This activity, if we promote it, can become one of humans' most pleasurable habits, according to Heathfield (2014).
In this chapter we will use the story as a didactic and motivating tool for the pupils in 5th-grade Primary Education. English children’s literature will be used to justify teaching/learning English and the development of the critical competencies established by the legislation regulating the Primary Education stage in Spain. To do this, we will put on parallel paths the transmission of values to inculcate in a very heterogeneous group on the one hand and the pleasure of reading as an attractive and motivating activity even in a foreign language on the other.
They aim to converge in the objective of learning English differently and achieve the integral formation of people, making them enjoy the stories that are read. The main objective of this chapter is to implement a didactic proposal based on the use of stories in English for the education in values in a group of children in the fifth year of Primary Education. To achieve this general objective, a pair of specific objectives will be specified: to compile the observations and data of interest in the practice diary throughout the implementation of the didactic proposal that will serve to exemplify the descriptions and observations made and to observe the possibilities of reflection and the capacity of the group of students who make up the population of the group studied.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Education in Values: Values education refers to the aspect of the educational practice which entails that moral or political values, as well as norms, dispositions, and skills grounded in those values, are mediated to or developed among students.
Written Skills: You use writing skills to write effectively and succinctly. A good writer can communicate their point to their audience without using too much fluff and in a way that the other person can understand.
Foreign Language: A foreign language is a language that is not an official language of, nor typically spoken in a specific country. Native speakers from that country usually need to acquire it through conscious learning, such as language lessons at school, self-teaching, or attending language understanding and engaging include the ability to understand and engage in a discipline's discourses and rhetorical situations by delivering expressing and interpreting or performances and to express and interpret ideas—both their own and those of others—in clear oral presentations or performances.
Children’s Literature: The genre encompasses a wide range of works, including acknowledged classics of world literature, picture books and easy-to-read stories written exclusively for children, and fairy tales, lullabies, fables, folk songs, and other primarily orally transmitted materials.
Primary Education: Primary education is compulsory and free. This stage of education is divided into six academic years, generally for those aged between 6 and 12.
Second Language Learning: Second language learning (SLL) is concerned with the process and study of how people acquire a second language, often referred to as L2 or target language, as opposed to L1 (the native language).
Values: Values are individual beliefs that motivate people to act one way or another. They serve as a guide for human behavior. Generally, people are predisposed to adopt the values they were raised with. People also tend to believe those values are “right” because they are the values of their culture.