Abstract:

As foreign language teachers we are constantly faced with the challenge of finding new, modern, innovative and, above all, attractive to our students, methods and ways that will enable us to more easily adopt foreign vocabulary and thus, of course, achieve students’ richer vocabulary. Thus, our goal as linguists, researchers and primarily teachers is to enrich the vocabulary of foreign words in our students, i.e., students at the departments of Macedonian, German, English, and Italian language and literature at the Faculty of Philology, University "Goce Delcev" - Stip, the Republic of North Macedonia. For that aim, a research team consisting of several professors from the above mentioned departments has prepared this study based on the results of the research in which the third and fourth-year students were included from these departments and answered the questionnaire that consisted of two parts: the first part where carefully selected general questions were asked regarding the knowledge of fairy tales in their mother tongue and foreign languages, and the second part contained practical exercises with which we wanted to prove or disprove our thesis that children who actively read and retold fairy tales in early childhood, have a richer vocabulary at a later age. Confirmation or rejection of our thesis is of great importance for us as a research teaching staff, but also for our students, future teachers, who need to actively transfer their knowledge to their prospective students. With this study, we want to help the teaching professionals and, through the well-known fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, to facilitate the acquisition of a foreign language in a more sophisticated, easier, and more interesting manner.
The question is why fairy tales are the subject of our interest and why we propose them for easier adoption of foreign lexicon by students from the listed language departments at the Faculty of Philology. In response, we quote the well-known thought of Albert Einstein:
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

With this Einstein’s quote we begin our work because it, in a concise way, conveys the powerful message that is present in every fairy tale, be it in the native Macedonian language or in German, English, Italian or another foreign language. Einstein says that wise people teach their children about life with instructive messages presented through fairy tales. So, by learning about life and the wisdom of life, in fact, new vocabulary of a foreign language is unconsciously adopted by the students from the mentioned language departments at the Faculty of Philology. There is great truth in this Einstein's quote that fairy tales really have a positive impact on the enrichment of the vocabulary both of the native Macedonian language and of the foreign languages our students study.

Keywords:

Fairy tales, vocabulary, foreign language.