Storytelling into Writing: Effects on pupils’ composition skills and self-efficacy

This thesis evaluates the impact of a widely used oral storytelling approach for teaching writing.

It is proposed that the approach may target primary pupils' story writing through the development of increased self-efficacy and targeting of vocabulary, ideas, sentence structure, organisation of writing and story structure.

A systematic review aims to address the question 'Which universal story writing interventions raise the writing self-efficacy of school age students?'

Eleven studies were identified and analysed.

It was concluded that there are some interventions that increase self-efficacy for story writing; those that provide students with specific writing goals, provide feedback and add a self-regulatory element to instruction.

The empirical paper evaluates the impact of the storytelling intervention on writing quality (vocabulary, sentence structure, organisation, ideas and story structure) and self-efficacy for writing (in the domains of ideation, conventions and self-regulation for writing).

A between-groups experimental design was used in two primary schools.

An ANOVA indicated non-significant results for the effect of the intervention on overall writing quality, vocabulary, sentence structure, organisation, story structure and the domains of self-efficacy for writing ideation and self-regulation.

There was a significant improvement in the intervention group for writing ideas, overall self-efficacy for writing and in the domain of self-efficacy for writing conventions (spelling, grammar and punctuation).

As vocabulary level has been reported to predict writing competence, scores on a measure of receptive vocabulary entered as a covariate.

Non-significant results were found for all measures apart from writing ideas which improved significantly in the intervention group when vocabulary was controlled for.

Finally, when receptive vocabulary was added as an additional factor, it was found that there was no differential effect of the intervention on any of the writing outcomes relative to receptive vocabulary ability, suggesting that the effects of the intervention are similar for pupils of differing abilities.