A big number of learners have grown up in a learning context full of narrative stories, retold by their parents, grandparents, or elder brothers and sisters. The value of tales in teaching was widely analysed by Russian and English researchers and has become a modern subject matter nowadays. Comparative analysis was used to identify the main advantages of using tales in didactic purposes, while the synthesis method aimed at establishing the concrete outcomes of this method applied to specific groups of learners. It is well known that tales have complex moral messages that function as educational factors in a child’s life. E.A. Flerina, the great Russian teacher in the field of aesthetic education believes that “telling stories achieves a special immediacy of perception” [7], while Kl. Chukovsky states that the main goal of tales is “to raise humanity in a child” [8]. The English scholar G. Lazar asserts that “Literature provides wonderful source material for eliciting strong emotional responses from our students” [6, p. 3]. As we see, these statements coincide in that they attribute tales strong emotional value. When analyzing children’s most important needs that are the necessary for autonomy, the need for strength and the need for activity [2, p. 17-34], we may certainly state that tales, introducing the pupils to extraordinary events, teach them good attitudes, show high feelings and aspirations. Many experiments based on the connection between the memory and emotions showed that: “a person’s emotional state at the time of an event can influence whether or not it is encoded as a memory” [1, p. 73-99]; words, which were intended to elicit an emotional response, were recalled more frequently than words which carried less emotional connotations [5, p. 474-488]. Researchers Ellis and Brewster [3, p.12] give criteria for selecting tales: the linguistic, psychological and cultural aspects. We chose authentic English folktales by Joseph Jacobs: “The Three Wishes” and “The Old Witch”. In the first group we applied the strategy studied in this article and in the second group we followed the textbook and the exercise given there. Our aim was to demonstrate that tales as a factor of building strong emotional responses facilitate the process of acquiring new vocabulary items. We used more techniques combined with this strategy to design the assignments. The tasks were based on the tale and incorporated elements such as: guessing the meaning of the word from the context, matching the abstract that contains the word with the picture, retelling the text from a character’s perspective by using the new vocabulary items, drawing the abstract that contains the given item, role-play using the words studied. The results in the 2nd group are far better, as we supposed before the experiment: 1039%; 9-39%, 8-6%, 7-11%, 6-5%, 5-0% in comparison with the 1st group: 10- 8%, 9-0%, 8-0%, 7-54%, 6-23%, 5-15%. In conclusion, emotional responses correlate with the increase in the memorization rates. Implicitly, tales may be considered a mechanism for exposing pupils to new vocabulary, style, structures and experiences. Connecting tales to children’s personal cultural and social background facilitates the process of learning new words.