This paper highlights the responses of adult Chinese EFL students in private language school free-talk classes in Beijing and Shanghai to illustrated Chinese folktales written in English. Responses were collected by means of field notes, observer comments, videotapes, audiotapes, questionnaires, student writing, emails, student art and oral description of art work. Although the study was qualitative in nature, analysis and counts of the incidence of single word, phrase, clause, and sustained discourse output of the students in question-and-answer exchanges with the teacher/researcher showed that sustained discourse in English increased by nearly three times during one three-week period with the most stable group. This is a strong indicator that illustrated Chinese folktales served the purpose of giving English-as-a-Foreign-Language students a substantive topic of real interest for developing communicative skills, while serving for the native English teacher/researcher as a convenient resource for visual stimuli, story prompts, and question prompts in an environment where visual aids were not otherwise easily accessed.
