Story telling by both teacher and children can be a most enjoyable part of English work and plays a significant role in the development of children’s oral language. It contributes particularly to children’s ability to use narrative as a way of organising ideas and experiences. ‘Story telling’ covers a range of activities from the short anecdotes children share to the performance of a gifted adult story teller.
We have a rich treasure house to draw on: not only have we our own store of United Kingdom traditional tales, riddles, sayings and nursery rhymes which can be told as well as read, we can also draw on stories from oral cultures across the world. The arrival of children in our schools whose roots are in cultures rich in story telling has heightened our interest (Graham and Kelly, 2007). Teachers often model story telling, sometimes using story props – characters and scenery – on a felt story board. Some children are eager to take a turn at telling stories to the group. As well as retellings from stories they have heard others tell or those based on book stories, children with some encouragement tell anecdotes about their lives both inside and outside the classroom. With a new class or group I have found telling my own anecdotes – the day I lost three guinea pigs – often encourages the children to share their tales. Children also come to school with stories about their family’s history – when they lived in another country or another part of the country or when Grandad or Grandma went to a Beatles concert in the 1960s. Student teachers I have worked with have, once they tried story telling activities in the classroom, often been surprised at the rich resources children are able to draw on. Medical emergencies including true tales of being admitted to casualty wards after accidents seem to be told with particular relish. Of course, with practice, children develop over the primary years in their control over a narrative, how they select and sequence the events, what they decide to emphasis in the characters to enhance the tale and how they bring the tale to a satisfying resolution.
In their book Reading Under Control Graham and Kelly set out one approach to first using story telling in the classroom. They cover the preparation you will have to do if you begin by telling a story to the class yourself and suggest you might base it on a written-down story with lots of humour and action. How you tell the story depends on the age of the children but you need to keep the pace up and include direct speech to keep it lively.
Hopefully the children will comment at the end without you asking them a question. Then, they could be invited to retell the story, perhaps several children telling part of it each (Graham and Kelly, 2007).
One very strong context for group story telling is drama and role play. An interesting book on drama and traditional tales shows how events in stories are given new meaning and significance when children take on the roles and ‘voices’ of the characters. For example, the linguistic resources of a group of very young children were extended when they took on the role of the staff of building suppliers selling materials to the three little pigs to construct their houses (Toye and Prendiville, 2000). In early years settings in particular, the teacher needs to help the children develop the narrative, often by taking a central role.
The storybox approach is a way of drawing children into a fictional world which has considerable appeal to the very young. Developed, used and evaluated by Helen Bromley, it involves early years teachers in placing some objects in a shoe box which provide the bare bones of a story (Bromley, 2000). The children can build on miniature settings for the objects, choosing all or just some of the objects to tell a story. One box much favoured by the girls in the class Helen Bromley worked with, presented a vet’s surgery and had Playmobil people and some animals ready to be patients. Three boys chose a ‘Science Fiction’ box which, when the lid was lifted, looked like the inside of a moon crater and included space ships and moon rocks. The children, with a little encouragement, involved themselves in imaginative play and spoke in the roles of the people and animals, using language appropriate for the various situations. This proved to be a window into children’s thinking and therefore indicated what they knew and understood.
Story telling links with the development of literacy in several important ways.
An introduction to the features of stories in oral form help children understand the same features when they occur in written form and in other media like film and television. All stories have a setting, characters and a sequence of events or plot. Usually there is a conflict to be resolved. Being exposed to these features in a told story helps children bring a set of expectations about form, structure and events when they read from books. Older primary children can be helped to consider how told and written-down stories differ. What, for example, replaces tone, pitch, pace, gesture and facial expression in a writtendown story?
Certainly a knowledge of traditional stories gained through oral tellings helps children enjoy fully books like Hoffman and Binch’s Amazing Grace and Grace and Her Family published by Frances Lincoln. These written-down stories draw on the ancient tales in all sorts of subtle ways: in the latter book Grace is shown reading a book about fairy tales when her stepmother offers her food. Other examples of intertextual stories are I Like Books (a book about genre for very young children) and The Tunnel both by Anthony Browne and The Jolly Postman by Allan and Janet Ahlberg.
Story telling is not only for very young children. A Year 5 class told their own stories to the class about sibling relationships (or relationships with friends) after hearing The Tunnel read out and savouring and talking about the pictures. The stories could be ‘true’ or from the world of the imagination. Later some of them adapted their stories into written form. So this series of lessons moved naturally from listening, to reading to telling and then back to writing again. Another powerful example of how hearing a text read aloud encouraged children’s desire to read involved 9–11 year olds who had heard gifted storytellers tell stories from the Iliad. The classroom researchers found that an oral resource telling of great and dramatic adventures achieved a deep engagement on the part of the pupils (Reedy and Lister, 2007).
Story telling can stretch out across a number of subjects – dance and drama of course but also history, geography, science and even mathematics – but in English lessons it is a valuable activity in its own right from the earliest years onwards.
Bromley, Helen (2000) ‘The gift of transformation: children’s talk and story boxes’ in Language Matters Journal of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, Winter.
Graham, Judith and Kelly, Alison (2007, third edition) Reading Under Control London: David Fulton.
Grainger, Teresa (1997) Traditional Storytelling in the Primary Classroom Leamington Spa: Scholastic.
Grugeon, E. and Gardner, P. (2000) The Art of Storytelling in the Primary Classroom London: David Fulton.
Howe, A. and Johnson, J. (1992) Common Bonds: Storytelling in the Classroom Sevenoaks: Hodder & Stoughton.
Reedy, D. and Lister, B. (2007) ‘“Bursting with blood and passion”: the impact of an oral retelling of the Iliad in the primary classroom,’ in Literacy, 41(1).
Toye, Nigel and Prendiville, Francis (2000) Drama and the Traditional Story London: Routledge/Falmer.
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