Story Writing Principles and ESL Teaching *

Is it possible that we ESL/EFL teachers can profit by using principles of good story‐telling along with the more familiar and more traditional principles of structural analysis? Four hypotheses about language use and language acquisition are discussed. They include the textuality hypothesis, the expectancy hypothesis, Krashen's input hypothesis, and the episode hypothesis (closely related to Krashen's “net” hypothesis). These working hypotheses are used to support the overarching suggestion that story‐telling techniques may be helpful in making ESL/EFL materials meaningful, comprehensible, recallable, and in a word, learnable. Eleven specific principles are discussed and exemplified.