Storytelling is central to the language classroom because learners encounter language not as isolated vocabulary and grammar, but through characters, voices, conflicts, memories, and points of view. Stories also carry social assumptions. They can reproduce familiar ideas about gender and identity, leave particular experiences unspoken, or create space for learners to question inherited roles and imagine other possibilities. A language classroom that reads stories critically can therefore become a space for linguistic development as well as reflective engagement with power and representation.