Topic: Young Learners | Storytelling in ELT
Presenter: Christina Konstantakelis
Presentation details
This presentation, “Once Upon a Lesson…”, explores the pedagogical value of storytelling as a dynamic and interactive approach to enhance student engagement, language acquisition, and critical thinking in both online and face-to-face classrooms. It responds to the need for more meaningful and participatory teaching practices by demonstrating how an adapted story, supported by structured activities, can transform a lesson into an immersive learning experience.
The session is grounded in established theories of second language acquisition, scaffolding, and communicative language teaching. A brief theoretical overview is provided at the beginning, drawing on relevant literature to justify the use of storytelling as an effective instructional strategy. This foundation supports the practical focus of the presentation, which centres on a fully adapted story designed specifically for classroom use, along with a sequence of carefully structured activities.
The presenter will demonstrate how the story is taught in practice, showing step-by-step implementation of scaffolding techniques that guide learners through comprehension, participation, and production. Particular attention is given to how teachers can engage students actively through repetition of meaningful language chunks, guided interaction, and interactive tasks that support vocabulary retention and fluency development.
The session also highlights how storytelling can foster empathy, cultural awareness, and learner motivation by allowing students to engage with narrative content in an accessible and meaningful way. The accompanying activities illustrate how theoretical principles can be translated into practical classroom strategies that are adaptable to different learning contexts and proficiency levels.
Participants will leave with a ready-to-use adapted story, a set of classroom activities, and a clear model for implementation, demonstrating how storytelling can be effectively integrated into everyday teaching to create more engaging, inclusive, and learner-centred language lessons.
About the presenter
Christina Konstantakelis holds an MA in TESOL from Deree – The American College of Greece and a CertTESOL from Trinity College London. She also holds International House certificates in Teaching Young Learners and Teenagers and in Business English. Currently, she teaches General and Business English online at International House Bratislava and English for Academic Purposes at Metropolitan College, Greece.
She fosters learner autonomy through scaffolding and empowerment. Her interests include language-teaching pedagogy and the effective integration of technology in education.