Thirtieth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

The current quasi-experimental study aims at finding the impact of a story-based language learning approach on different aspects of language learning. Ten students aged between 17-19 studying at a pre-intermediate level at the English Education Program of Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakif University are the participants of this study as the experimental group and 10 students of the same profile participate in the study as the control group. It is a seven-week process in which the experimental group associated new vocabulary with the archetypal images and wrote sentences for them as an in-class activity. In addition, as an extracurricular activity, they individually wrote a story following “The Hero’s Journey” by using the archetypes which they worked on as characters in their stories. Following this process, they narrated in pairs the stories they wrote after each extracurricular session where they completed a certain stage of the Hero’s Journey in their stories. To investigate the impact of the current study on the participants’ language competence, the weekly writing outcomes of the experimental group were investigated as a formative assessment method the results were analyzed via content analysis. Additionally, to support this data and explore the perceptions of the experimental group regarding the impact of the study, focus group interviews were held and the results were analyzed via content analysis. The results show that the current study has positive impact on language learning in a variety of ways.