Teaching Listening and Speaking to Young Learners Through Folktales

Folktales are an interesting subject to be taught to young learners. It is one of the effective ways to make young learners understand English. This study describes the effect of using Balinese short stories to teach a class of young learners at Saraswati Primary School in Denpasar. The stories are an effective aid for teaching English as they have beautiful language, rhythmic refrains and repetitive sentence patterns. During the listening lesson, students are given pictures books （content stories） and occasionally they are set to listen to CDs. Various attractive strategies were used to help students acquire listening and speaking skills. After the strategies have been used for one semester, they show significant improvement on the progress of the students in acquiring the listening and speaking skills as shown by progress of the result in the test of listening or speaking