UC Berkeley

Extensive bodies of literature examining child language acquisition and early literacy development indicate that the language and literacy opportunities young children have at home and in school settings, including the nature of their language interactions with adults and their exposure to books and stories, are consequential for mastery of conventional literacy and long-term academic success (Burchinal & Forestieri, 2011; Catts et al., 2001; Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997; Fernald & Weisleder, 2015). Research reports indicating numerous common and distinct benefits to book reading (e.g., Elley, 1989; Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998; Neuman, 1999; Becher, 1985) and storytelling (e.g., Isbell et al., 2004; Trostle & Hicks, 1998) for emergent and beginning readers and writers would suggest that children learning in settings where both activities are implemented would be poised to receive the best of both worlds.

This study investigated the affordances for the development of narrative comprehension and academic language that arise when young children participate in both read aloud and storytelling lessons. I conducted an ethnographic case study of an ongoing arts-integrated storytelling program for preschoolers, Language and Learning Through Oral Storytelling, that was collaboratively implemented by a community arts organization and a Head Start agency in four preschool classrooms at a single Head Start site serving large numbers of emergent bilingual students and children diagnosed with disabilities. Two teaching artists with professional backgrounds in theater and dance, one seasoned and one new to the storytelling program, delivered over a period of several months in two classrooms each 12 participatory storytelling sessions organized into four units that were designed to promote understanding of narrative. I recorded, transcribed, and analyzed storytelling sessions to investigate and compare the repertoire of language-promoting pedagogical tools that each teaching artist used to promote the narrative register, academic language, and comprehension for stories.

In addition, I served as a participant observer in the four classrooms, a role that allowed me informally observe the typical read aloud practices of the classroom teachers as well as to record, transcribe, and analyze their read aloud lessons for the focal picture books that anchored each storytelling unit. A fifth preschool classroom located at second nearby Head Start site served as a no treatment control to permit me to examine teacher read aloud practices in a setting outside the influence of the storytelling program. I compared the read aloud practices of the storytelling teachers to each other and to the control teacher to investigate the language-promoting pedagogical tools they used to promote students’ control of the narrative register, academic language, and comprehension for stories during read aloud lessons. Finally, I asked how the affordances of these two learning contexts—storytelling and reading aloud—complemented and contrasted with one another.

Findings indicate that the teaching artists’ pedagogical repertoires were more complex and diverse than those used by the classroom teachers for reading aloud due the wider array of activities used within the storytelling program. The classroom contexts into which the storytelling program was implemented, and the roles played by individual classroom teachers were found to be important contributors to how the storytelling sessions were enacted and experienced in each classroom. The two teaching artists overall used a similar repertoire of language-promoting practices, but the more seasoned artist’s prior experience working with preschoolers in the storytelling program appeared to assist her in designing and teaching heavily scaffolded lessons that minimized misunderstandings with students whereas the new artists’ more relaxed implementation of the storytelling lesson framework and her high expectations for preschool students’ capacity for mature reasoning led to communication problems with students somewhat more frequently. They both strongly emphasized building common knowledge and student observation of and performance of acts of storytelling. The performance orientation placed considerable demands on students’ cognitive, linguistic, motor, and social capacities, while at the same time offering a highly engaging and often exciting forum in which to build understanding of story. This is an important finding given the scope of extant literature on storytelling; in no other study was the storytelling intervention led by professional teaching artists, and in no other study was fully embodied participation by students so emphasized.

The classroom teachers shared many commonalities in their read aloud practices, including the finding that many of the language-promoting practices under analysis occurred only occasionally and sometimes not at all during their read aloud lessons. A major unexpected finding was the low frequency of read aloud lessons and sometimes circumscribed nature of those lessons in the four storytelling classrooms as the result of broader professional, instructional, and social forces that shaped the context for instruction at this site. In contrast, the control classroom was found have a particularly vibrant and effective program of reading instruction due operating under substantially different professional, instructional, and social forces. Students at this site enjoyed listening to and talking about books and at times engaged in emergent independent and partner reading. This finding supports existing literature on reading aloud, which indicates that children who find listening to and talking about books to be pleasurable activities are more likely to read independently once they learn to read (Bus, 2002; Cunningham & Zibulsky, 2011) which can have consequential impacts on their success in school and available life choices, as volume of reading is strongly correlated with general knowledge and reading achievement (Cervetti & Hiebert, 2015; Sparks et al., 2014; Stanovich & Cunningham, 1993).