Stories beyond Books: Teacher Storytelling Supports Children’s Literacy Skills

ABSTRACT

Given the changing demographics of young children served by U.S. schools, educational equity practices must include ways of sustaining cultural heritage practices of children from ethno-linguistic, minoritized, and under-resourced communities. In the present study, we partnered with a bilingual Head Start serving mostly children of immigrant families from Latin American backgrounds to explore the effectiveness of a classroom-based oral storytelling program grounded in the cultural heritage practices of Spanish-speaking communities. We trained lead teachers (n = 12) in either an oral storytelling program or a storybook reading program. Research Findings: Analyses were conducted at the child level (n = 185) and provided initial evidence for the benefits of integrating oral storytelling in preschool classrooms to enhance the quality of teacher language input and support the development of children’s narrative skills. Practice or Policy: Findings contribute to our knowledge base on the differential effects of story sharing modality and have implications for the education of young Latine children.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the administrators, teachers, and families of our partnering Head Start Center. The authors would like to thank Maria Petrolekas, Shevy Schick, Lauren Scarola, & Rachel Xi-Zhen Lim for their assistance in early phases of this project and manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Brady Education Foundation to the first and second authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We use Latine to refer to individuals whose cultural background originated in Spanish-speaking Latin America. As a native Spanish speaker and Latine scholar, the first author prefers to adopt the Spanish language gender-inclusive ending “e” commonly used in Spanish-speaking countries, instead of the English term Latinx (for a discussion see also de Onís, 2017; Zentella, 2017).

2. Notably, though, to the best of our knowledge, only teachers in the storybook reading classrooms included our specific pre-reading, reading, and post-reading strategies while reading storybooks with their class.