THE ROLE OF STORYTELLING IN DEVELOPING YOUNG LEARNERS' LISTENING COMPREHENSION

Storytelling enhances young learners’ listening comprehension by combining meaningful context, repeated exposure, and multimodal cues that reduce cognitive load and support inference-making. Through narrative structure, children predict, infer, and retain vocabulary, while gestures, images, and intonation strengthen dual coding and memory. Empirical studies in EFL settings report improvements in gist understanding, detail recognition, and vocabulary acquisition when stories are integrated systematically with pre- and post-listening activities. Scaffolding, cultural relevance, and repeated listening maximize outcomes across contexts. [1,41p ]