Storytelling and Young Learners’ 21st Century Skill Development

Storytelling has proved to have positive impacts on L1 students’ development in their childhood via empirical research on children’s behaviors and investigations into brain react. In the context of ESL in Viet Nam, storytelling has recently received increasing attention in certain young learners’ English programs, and reportedly improved language skills significantly. It is worth noting that learning a language should also help students become more culture aware and build characters or personalities, which can be seen in the embedment of 21st century skills in the curriculum. Unfortunately, this part of research is still limited in the literature of young learners in Viet Nam, which leaves a gap for this study to investigate the influences of storytelling as a compulsory component of the Oxford International Curriculum (OIC) in 2 first authorized piloting schools in Hanoi, Viet Nam, proudly among the first 20 OIC institutions worldwide since 2020. Class observations, examination of class works by around 100 OIC students of grades 1 and 2, and in-depth interviews with the 4 teachers revealed kids’ significant establishment and improvement of 4 out 6Cs, namely Critical thinking, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity. Simultaneously, those very young students only began to be aware of Citizenship and Character.