Christmas Eve Story By Anja Prentić, Ph.D. student, Belgrade University, Elementary school ''Knez Sima Marković'' Reflections on SEETA Storytelling for Young Learners Closed Course
Key words: storytelling, online course, SEETA, young learners
Introduction This article is inspired by an engaging experience I had as a participant in one of SEETA's closed courses. This opportunity provided by ELTA has given me a chance to enrol in a colourful intercultural exchange of teaching ideas and experiences, as well as my personal advancement in the area of storytelling. This SEETA online course titled Storytelling for Young Learners was hosted by Zhivka Ilieva, a teacher trainer, an expert on teaching Young Learners and the President of BETA Bulgaria. In the period of a couple of weeks, the participants were able to learn and share their thoughts on the given activities, taking part in forums. The aim of this article is to inspire other teachers to enrol in any similar projects by presenting the course and my reflections on it. I have also included my final project, the Christmas Eve story, as my personal contribution to storytelling practice. The paper discusses the activities and stages of course, accompanied by my personal thoughts and ideas. Storytelling for Young Learners Stage 1 Introduction to the course The host presented the participants with the course outline and the required tasks as the first stage of the course. Introducing storytelling in language teaching, she underlined some of the elements which are significant for teaching young learners, such as a relation to caretaker talk, motivation, child's attitude, nonverbal communication, adaptability, aiding language acquisition, etc. She also listed a number of relevant resources, enabling further research.