`When it's fun you learn more!´: Storyline and the young language learner

In the Storyline approach a fictive world is created in the classroom. Working in small groups, the learners create characters to people a story, speaking and writing in role. The story develops as the learners work on open key questions, based on curriculum content and integrating linguistic and practical skills. A word often used by participants in a Storyline topic is `fun´. I investigated which features of the Storyline approach particularly appealed to a class of 11-13 year-olds who took part in Our Sustainable Street and what impact working in this way had on their learning of English This paper reports on that study, which concluded that the Storyline approach offers significant benefits for the development of communicative competence, and shows how Storyline can meet the requirements of the curriculum.