"LANGUAGE ACQUISITIONAL STORYTELLING": PSYCHOLINGUISTICS IN ACTION IN THE ITALIAN EFL CLASSROOM

The aim of the present paper is to analyse the educational activity of storytellingfrom an innovative perspective: storytelling as a "psycholinguistic" teaching/learningtool, which can effectively facilitate the acquisition of English as a foreign languageby presenting a story through the main stages of acquisition of English as a firstlanguage. The educational context where this new teaching/learning strategy isproposed is the class of English language/culture in Italian primary schools. Inparticular, a new typology of storytelling will be here presented and examined, underthe definition of "language acquistional storytelling". This teaching/learning tool canenable teachers to expose their pupils to simple stories in English, in which thelanguage is gradually construed through the main stages of acquisition of English as afirst language, and is at the same time adapted to the specific context ofteaching/learning English as a foreign language.In the course of our discussion, some examples derived from an Englishchildren's book "There's an Alligator under My Bed" by Mercer Meyer will beoffered. Alongside, this teaching/learning proposal intends to suggest some creativeactivities and games which can help pupils understand, employ, internalize and reemploythe language forms and rules that are inductively introduced by the teacher inthe course of the narration itself