Using Social Stories and Coping Skills to Teach Vocabulary in Primary Education

Abstract

We report on a novel experiment that tests the use of social stories versus the use of more traditional storytelling for teaching vocabulary terms on emotions and coping skills in the primary TEFL classroom. The study further combines elements of developmentally appropriate materials, mindfulness, and vocabulary teaching strategies. Social stories are short stories, which provide “appropriate responses to significant situations in a social context”, designed as a tool for students with Autism spectrum disorders (Bozkurt and Varan 2014), while storytelling highlights the use of narration to teach language. The results support the novelty of this research, which shows that social stories can be used as an inclusive resource with students of various abilities, with primary children, and in the TEFL setting. Ultimately, it is argued that this use of social stories could be extended to other vocabulary areas in the TEFL field.