Remembering and Recalling English Stories by EFL Learners

Abstract

This study aims at providing an empirical foundation of students' abilities to recall stories. It is a psycholinguistic manipulation of the operations that accompany the processes occurring in the recall of English stories by a sample of Iraqi university students of English. This study is based on the assumption that psychological processes as perception, attention, memory and skill are responsible for the linguistic operations of sharpening, leveling and rationalization that stories undergo from the first moment they inter the mind up to the point of retrieval. The results provide evidence that when stories are recalled, certain changes and modifications take place due to specific structural and psychological reasons. It maintains the point of view that some story structure and story recall patterns are universal. The results prove that stories can be valuable means in the field of teaching English as a foreign language because of the role they play in the development of foreign language skills.