The Effect of Storytelling at School on Children’s Oral and Written Language Abilities, and School Connectedness

The review paper consisted of a systematic literature review of 12 studies, exploring whether teacher-led story-reading interventions improved the oral and written language of typically-developing children in primary schools.

All studies reviewed found that storybook reading interventions led to an improvement in at least one outcome measure of children's oral and written language at post-test, and most of these were to a significant level when compared with a control group who did not receive the intervention.

Mostly small and medium effect sizes were reported.

The empirical paper explored whether being told stories by a teacher in school four out of five days a week for ten weeks would lead to improvements in Year 2 children's oral language, written language, and feelings of schools connectedness, and whether these improvements would be greater than those experienced by an active comparison group who were read the same stories from books, and a comparison group who continued with usual classroom literacy practices.

The study employed a quasi-experimental between-participants design. Mixed ANOVAs showed that the storytelling group told significantly longer oral retellings of stories and used a significantly wider range of words than the story-reading group and comparison group, at post-test and three-month follow-up.

The story-reading group scored significantly higher on the vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Fourth UK Edition (WISC-IV) than the comparison group at follow-up.

No significant differences between intervention groups were found for oral retellings, written retellings of stories scored by teachers using the Writing Assessment Measure (WAM), or on measures within the Early Attitudes Test - Revised (EAT-R).

These findings support previous research showing that storytelling improves children's oral language.

A new model of oral and written language development is posited, and recommendations are made for greater use of storytelling by teachers in primary schools.