Once Upon a Timeline: Storytelling as a Pedagogy of Listening and Speaking for Generation Z and Generation Alpha Learners

Abstract

Listening and speaking remain the least systematically taught skills in many school English classrooms, precisely as they become the skills most demanded of a generation formed by voice, video, and participatory media. This conceptual article argues that oral storytelling the oldest of language-teaching technologies is uniquely suited to developing the aural–oral competence of Generation Z and Generation Alpha learners, provided it is redesigned around what is actually known about these cohorts rather than around popular myths of digital nativity and collapsing attention spans. The article first audits generational claims against the critical literature, retaining three defensible design constraints: multimodal habituation, participatory expectation, and an everyday vernacular of micro-narrative (stories, reels, streams). It then grounds storytelling pedagogy in narrative psychology and second language acquisition theory, synthesising evidence that live telling outperforms reading aloud for oral-language growth, and maps established techniques story-listening, dictogloss, retelling, fluency cycles, digital storytelling onto listening and speaking development. The article's central contribution is the Story Cycle for Screen-Native Learners (SCSNL), a six-stage pedagogical framework (Hook, Tell, Reconstruct, Remix, Perform, Reflect) that moves learners from scaffolded narrative listening to increasingly autonomous speaking and publication. A concluding research agenda specifies a mixed-methods quasi-experimental design, with validated instruments, through which the framework's claims can be empirically tested.