Reading & Writing Quarterly

Overcoming Learning Difficulties

ISSN: 1057-3569 (Print) 1521-0693 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/urwl20

The Effect of Storytelling at School on Children’s

Oral and Written Language Abilities and Self-
Perception

Catherine Z. Wright & Sandra Dunsmuir

To cite this article: Catherine Z. Wright & Sandra Dunsmuir (2019): The Effect of Storytelling at
School on Children’s Oral and Written Language Abilities and Self-Perception, Reading & Writing
Quarterly, DOI: 10.1080/10573569.2018.1521757

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2018.1521757

Published online: 05 Jan 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=urwl20
READING & WRITING QUARTERLY
https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2018.1521757

The Effect of Storytelling at School on Children’s Oral and

Written Language Abilities and Self-Perception
Catherine Z. Wright and Sandra Dunsmuir
University College London, London, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT
This study explored whether being told stories by a teacher in school
4 days a week for 10 weeks would lead to improvements in 6- and 7-year-
old children’s oral language, written language, and self-perception. We also
explored whether these improvements would be greater than those expe-
rienced by an active comparison group that was read the same stories
from books and a comparison group that continued with their usual class-
room literacy practices. We used a quasi-experimental between-participants
design: 194 participants took part, and classes (rather than participants)
were randomly assigned to intervention conditions. Results showed that
the storytelling group retold stories that were significantly longer and used
a significantly wider range of vocabulary than both the group that was
read the same stories and the comparison group at posttest and 3-month
follow-up. The story-reading group scored significantly higher on an oral
vocabulary test than the comparison group at follow-up.

Storytelling
Storytelling involves recounting a story from memory or imagination without a book. Storytelling
occurs in almost every culture in the world and has been around for a long time, predating writ-
ing; it is common to all human societies and is used in the transmission of cultural heritage, hav-
ing an important social and educational function (Mello, 2001). Different cultures have different
approaches to oral storytelling. For example, in indigenous communities, oral storytelling is often
used as a way of teaching the community’s values rather than as a form of entertainment
(Archibald, 2008). In the Sto:Io community in Canada, storytelling is used as a way to teach chil-
dren about the land and their role within the community (Archibald, 2008). Similarly, in the
Quechua community in Peru, storytelling is used as a way of teaching children about their culture
and identity (Bolin, 2006). In contrast, the Hopi-Tewa community of Arizona uses storytelling as
a method of teaching children morals (Kroskrity, 2009). However, like many fields of research,
storytelling has predominantly been formally researched in developed Western societies, a fact
that is reflected in the overview of the literature on storytelling below.

Literature review on storytelling

A great deal of research has been conducted on the effect of story reading on improving aspects
of children’s oral and written language development, such as their vocabulary (Baker et al., 2013;
Brabham & Lynch-Brown, 2002; Brett, Rothlein, & Hurley, 1996; Fien et al., 2011; Maynard,

CONTACT Catherine Zoe Wright [email protected] Educational Psychology Group, Division of Psychology
and Language Sciences, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AP, UK.
ß 2019 Taylor & Francis
2 C. Z. WRIGHT AND S. DUNSMUIR

Pullen, & Coyne, 2010; Moore, Hammond, & Fetherston, 2014; Pullen, Tuckwiller, Konold,
Maynard, & Coyne, 2010), but much less has looked at the effects of storytelling on language
development. What limited research there is on storytelling has shown that storytelling has been
associated with improvements in children’s developing language and literacy skills, such as
vocabulary (Maguire, 1985), fluency (Farrell & Nessell, 1982), story comprehension (Palmer,
Harshbarger, & Koch, 2001), and story retelling.
Isbell, Sobol, Lindauer, and Lowrance (2004) compared the effect of storytelling and storybook
reading on young children’s (ages 3–5) language development and story comprehension. One
group of children was told stories over a period of 12 weeks, and another group was read the
same stories from books. The storytelling group scored higher on a measure of story comprehen-
sion, and the storybook-reading group scored higher on a measure of language complexity, which
shows that both of these interventions had a positive impact on children’s language development
(Isbell et al., 2004). Each group improved in aspects of language relating to the medium of the
intervention they received, a finding noted in a number of other studies as well (Lonigan,
Purpura, Wilson, Walker, & Clancy-Menchetti, 2013; Fisher & Frey, 2017).
Similarly, Trostle and Hicks (1998) conducted a study showing that 7- to 11-year-old children
who were told stories scored significantly higher on measures of story comprehension and
vocabulary than those who were read stories. Also, Gallets (2005) compared the effects of story-
telling versus story reading on the language skills of children ages 5 to 8. He found that both
methods led to improvements on most measures, but children in the storytelling condition made
bigger improvements than the other group on some measures, such as recalling information from
the stories (Gallets, 2005). In addition, a study looking at the storytelling abilities of children with
specific language impairments found that these children were able to tell stories involving better
quality independent clauses and their modifiers when given verbal prompts while telling stories
than when given a wordless picture book to base the stories on (Epstein & Phillips, 2009).
As technological advances have been made, storytelling has begun to be used in combination
with these to develop children’s language skills. For example, one study explored using robots to
tell stories to preschool children, modeling narration skills and introducing new vocabulary to
them, to see the effect on the children’s language abilities (Kory & Breazeal, 2014). Findings have
not yet been reported, as this is the start of a longitudinal study. However, the researchers antici-
pate finding that if a robot adapts its language ability to match, or be greater than, the children’s
developing language ability, then this will lead to greater improvements in the children’s vocabu-
lary and storytelling abilities as a result of interaction with the storytelling robot than if the robot
does not adapt during the intervention (Kory & Breazeal, 2014). They suggest that using robots
may be an effective way of supporting and developing young children’s language skills (Kory &
Breazeal, 2014).
As well as a growing body of research on the positive effects of storytelling on children’s devel-
opment, there has been a burgeoning national awareness in the United Kingdom of the benefits
of storytelling and a move toward incorporating storytelling into education practices. For
example, in February 2016, the Minister of State for School Standards in the United Kingdom
gave a speech explaining the importance of storytelling for children’s language development as
well as for expanding their imagination and leading to the development of other skills, such as
becoming competent readers, which in turn positively impacts on their later education (Gibb,
2016). In addition, the national initiative Talk for Writing (Department for Education, 2008),
done in collaboration with the storyteller Pie Corbett, is now used in many UK elementary
schools (Corbett, 2007). This involves a class of children being told a story by their teacher from
memory and then beginning to learn the story themselves and taking part in a range of activities
related to it (Corbett, 2007). However, this intervention does not yet have a published evi-
dence base.
 READING & WRITING QUARTERLY 3

Summary
This research all suggests that storytelling can lead to a number of improvements in children’s
language skills, but more research may be needed to further explore these benefits. Therefore, the
first aim of the current study was to replicate research findings showing improvements in child-
ren’s oral language as a result of a storytelling intervention.

Theory and literature review on oral and written language development

Dockrell and Connelly’s (2009) theory relating to the interconnection between the development
of oral and written language is the main theory that informed this study. This theory suggests
that children’s knowledge of oral language helps to develop their written language when they are
first learning to write (Dockrell & Connelly, 2009).
This has been highlighted by evidence that children’s writing quality is influenced by their oral
language skills at a number of levels, such as the word, subword, and sentence levels (Berninger,
Mizokawa, Bragg, Cartwright, & Yates, 1994), particularly in the early stages of writing
(Shanahan, 2006), when there are many similarities between oral and written language expression
and children’s written narratives have a very similar semantic structure to their oral narratives
(Hidi & Hildyard, 1983). Moreover, children who had higher levels of proficiency in speaking
their first language were found to have better writing abilities in their second language than those
with less spoken proficiency in their first language (Cummins, 1991), which suggests that know-
ledge from speaking informs writing even across languages.
Also, children’s oral vocabulary at the time they start school is often a predictor of their later
writing attainment (Dunsmuir & Blatchford, 2004), and oral vocabulary has been found to con-
tribute significantly to the writing ability of children with specific language impairments
(Dockrell, Lindsay, Connelly, & Mackie, 2007). In addition, research shows that children with
specific language impairments often have constrained written language abilities (Dockrell &
Connelly, 2009), and poor oral language skills, such as limited oral vocabulary or poor oral narra-
tive production, have been associated with difficulties composing written text (Bishop &
Clarkson, 2003; Puranik, Lombardino, & Altman, 2006), which highlights the importance of oral
language for developing written language. There could be a number of reasons for this, such as
low language ability generally; or a specific difficulty relating to grammar, vocabulary, or spelling;
or greater cognitive demands placed on the child with poor oral language when attempting to
write (Dockrell & Connelly, 2009). For example, even though oral and written language involve
many of the same abilities, such as lexical retrieval and formulation of syntax, producing written
language seems to require more cognitive effort and resources than producing oral language
(Bourdin & Fayol, 2000), and children find it harder to create a written narrative than a spoken
one (Gillam & Johnston, 1992).

Oral language
Young children’s oral language almost always develops before their written language, and all typ-
ically developing children learn to speak at least one language during early childhood without
needing any formal instruction (Crain & Lillo-Martin, 1999). However, oral language then contin-
ues to develop alongside the development of written language during early and middle childhood
(Semel, Wiig, & Secord, 2003). Linguistic constructions seen in speech appear in writing about a
year later (Loban, 1976), and the four main elements of oral and written language (speaking, lis-
tening, reading, and writing) develop in overlapping stages rather than discrete phases during this
time (Berninger, 2000; Shanahan, 2006).
4 C. Z. WRIGHT AND S. DUNSMUIR

Written language
The process of writing involves using some talk knowledge (Myhill, 2009). With some exceptions
(such as forms of writing that are very similar to speech and vice versa), informal speech and for-
mal writing are linguistically distinct (Myhill, 2009). For example, writing is usually more lexically
dense and better integrated than speech (Czerniewska, 1992), containing more complex and lon-
ger clauses and constructions (Chafe, 1982) and more passives than speech (O’Donnell, 1974).
There is usually more repetition in speech and more joining of clauses in writing (Perera, 1987).
When children are learning to write they have to apply knowledge about the grammar of writ-
ing as well as be able to think about how someone reading their writing might understand it
(reader awareness)—this first skill usually develops before the second (Myhill, 2009). Therefore,
inexperienced writers produce writer-based writing (focusing on their own writer’s perspective),
whereas experienced writers produce reader-based writing (as they become more aware of their
audience and aim their writing at them; Flower, 1979). A child learning to write will initially
scribe what comes to mind and tend to rely on the conventions of spoken language when pro-
ducing pieces of writing (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1982). As they develop their writing skills, chil-
dren become aware of how their text will come across to the reader; the more similar a written
form is to the spoken form, the easier it is for inexperienced writers to write it down (Bereiter &
Scardamalia, 1982). With age, children’s oral and written language usually become more distinct
and they will begin to use more complex grammatical constructions in writing than they do in
speech and to use more constructions specific to spoken language when speaking. By age 8, most
children’s writing contains few informal oral constructions—they are not simply writing down
what they might say, as they did when they were younger (Perera, 1986) but using formal written
conventions.

Summary
Given this interrelationship between the development of oral and written language, there is rea-
son to hypothesize that an oral storytelling intervention shown to improve the oral language skills
of young children (Isbell et al., 2004) may also lead to improvements in children’s written lan-
guage. This may be because generating a spoken narrative and generating a written one both use
language-related abilities (Cragg & Nation, 2006), and therefore children who are proficient at
doing one are likely to be good at doing the other. Thus, an intervention, such as a storytelling
intervention in which children are told stories orally, may provide young children with frame-
works from oral language that also fit in with writing conventions, allowing them to effectively
structure and develop their writing skills. Therefore, the second aim of the current study was to
explore whether a storytelling intervention that may lead to improvements in children’s oral lan-
guage can also lead to improvements in children’s written language.

Storytelling, school connectedness, and self-perception

A mediating factor in the development of children’s oral and written language is the way in
which children experience their learning environment. If children feel comfortable and happy at
school they are likely to be able to focus and produce higher quality work, which leads to them
developing better oral and written language skills. School connectedness (i.e., children’s belief that
people in their school care about both their learning and their well-being) has been associated
with a greater likelihood of academic success (Blum, 2005) and a reduction in fighting and class-
room disruption (Freiberg, Prokosch, Treister, Stein, & Opuni, 1989). This suggests that school
connectedness is an important factor when considering language and literacy interventions and
engagement. It is argued that interventions that promote children’s belief that adults and peers in
their school care about and are invested in their academic progress are likely to be effective in
 READING & WRITING QUARTERLY 5

improving engagement and learning. Interventions that lead to children feeling more connected
to those around them may also lead them to develop more positive concepts about themselves
and their abilities in certain domains, as children’s self-perception is created by their experiences
and understanding of their surroundings and their own judgments of their behavior as well as by
judgments made by people who are important to them (Shavelson, Hubner, & Stanton, 1976).
School connectedness has been associated with children reporting higher levels of emotional well-
being (Resnick, Harris, & Shew, 1997) and self-esteem (King, Vidourek, Davis, & McClellan,
2002), which suggests an association between school connectedness and self-perception.
Storytelling at school may be a way of increasing children’s school connectedness and, through
that, their self-perception. For example, it has been postulated that stories are a way of transmit-
ting social knowledge and practices through sharing personal understanding and experiences with
others (Egan, 1995). Stories are also used to develop self-perception through creating and devel-
oping personal narratives by ordering and recounting experiences (Polkinghorne, 1991). Many
traditional stories, such as fables and folk tales, are used to teach morals and ethical perspectives,
strengthening the social knowledge of the culture they represent (Mello, 2001). In early research
in this area, children who were told folk stories formed connections between events that hap-
pened to characters in the stories and events occurring in their own lives (Applebee, 1978; Favat,
1977), which illustrates the social connectedness generated by storytelling.
More recent research has found similar results. For example, Mello (2001) told children a
number of stories and then discussed these with them afterward. He found that the process of
storytelling, as well as the stories’ content, had a positive effect on the children’s feelings of
empathy, interest, and relationships with others (Mello, 2001). The stories elicited responses of
sympathy toward the various characters and situations described and, through discussion, allowed
the children to think in greater depth about the social aspects of their world (Mello, 2001).
Moreover, Egan (1997) suggested that storytelling stimulates children’s active engagement in the
story through the application of emotional intelligence and cognitive abilities. This suggests that
listening to a story is a social, as well as an emotionally engaging and interactive, shared experi-
ence that is likely to be associated with children’s feelings of connectedness with those around
them as well as to positively impact on the way they perceive themselves.
Thus, storytelling has been described as fundamental to the development of healthy social rela-
tionships (Pranis, 2001), helping children feel connected to their school community, increasing
prosocial behavior, and decreasing antisocial behavior (McNeely, Nonnemaker, & Blum, 2002).
Storytelling is likely to be generally helpful in supporting students in creating inclusive spaces for
themselves. Toward this end, storytelling could become part of creating a rich language learning
environment across the curriculum and throughout the day in schools to support children’s
developing language skills (Barnes, 1990) rather than being an isolated activity for developing
children’s language skills. Bruner (1986) argued that humans are hardwired to absorb, interpret,
transform, and retell stories as a way to make sense of the world. The ability to apply tenses (to
place in time) to the conditional clause (“What if?”) has allowed for imagination and the stuff of
thought to be the drivers for the storytelling instinct (Pinker, 2007), which is perhaps the most
basic and fundamental learning tool available when working with children. Limited evidence has
been conducted in this area, but Myers (1990) found that children were more engaged and fidg-
eted less when they were told stories than when they were read stories from books, which indi-
cates a higher level of engagement.

Summary
All of this research suggests that if storytelling is conducted at school, it could promote emotional
closeness and empathy between the children in the class listening to the story and between the
children and the teacher telling the story, increasing feelings of school connectedness. This in
6 C. Z. WRIGHT AND S. DUNSMUIR

turn is likely to improve children’s perception of their own abilities in different domains at
school. Therefore, the third aim of the current study was to explore the impact of a storytelling
intervention on children’s self-perception at school.

Aims
To summarize, the three aims of the current study were as follows:

1. To replicate research findings showing improvements in children’s oral language as a result

of a storytelling intervention.
2. To explore whether a storytelling intervention that may lead to improvements in children’s
oral language can also lead to improvements in children’s written language.
3. To explore the impact of a storytelling intervention on children’s self-perception at school.

Method
Participants
Eight classes of children (ages 6–7) from six inner-city schools from the same urban area partici-
pated in the study (two two-class entry schools and four one-class entry schools with between 21
and 30 children in each class), with a total of 194 children participating (105 boys, 89 girls). A
quasi-experimental between-participants design was used, which means that classes (rather than
individual children) were randomly assigned to conditions. The eight classes of children were ran-
domly assigned to one of three groups: the storytelling group (three classes; n ¼ 62), the story-
reading group (three classes; n ¼ 79), or the comparison group (two classes; n ¼ 53).
None of the children participating in this study had any previous or concurrent experience
taking part in a storytelling intervention, although some of the teachers delivering the interven-
tions reported telling their classes stories orally from time to time. The comparison group had
fewer participants than the other two groups, as this group consisted of only two classes of chil-
dren rather than three. There was variance in the percentages of children from different ethnic
backgrounds in the three groups. However, a more relevant factor here is the number of partici-
pants learning English as an additional language (EAL), as this study was exploring children’s
oral and written language abilities. The three intervention groups were comparable in terms of
participant characteristics relating to this factor as well as in numbers of children of each gender,
numbers of children with special educational needs, numbers of children with pupil premium eli-
gibility (an index of social deprivation), and the age of the children at the start of the interven-
tion. Independent-samples t tests were carried out to see whether there were any significant
differences in the numbers of children with each of these characteristics in the different interven-
tion groups. These t tests showed that there was no significant difference in any of these variables
between the storytelling group and the story-reading group or between the storytelling group and
the comparison group. However, there was a significant difference in the number of White-
British children between the comparison group (M ¼ 0.92, SD ¼ 0.267) and the story-reading
group (M ¼ 0.80, SD ¼ 0.404), t(130) ¼ 2.01, p ¼ .046.

Procedure
The intervention was run for 10 weeks. The storytelling group was told a story by their teacher
(who had previously read the story to herself twice and was telling it to the children from mem-
ory) 4 out of 5 days per week for 10 weeks, with a new story told each week, in addition to their
usual classroom literacy practices. The story-reading group was read the same story from a book
 READING & WRITING QUARTERLY 7

by their teacher 4 out of 5 days per week for 10 weeks, with a new story read each week, in add-
ition to their usual classroom literacy practices. The comparison group continued with their usual
classroom literacy practices. Usual classroom literacy practices consisted of the children receiving
a literacy lesson once a day as well as being read some stories by the teacher, usually on an ad
hoc basis that varied a little between the different classes.
The storytelling and story-reading interventions were universal programs delivered to all chil-
dren in the class irrespective of their oral and written language abilities and self-perception. This
was done as children with any level of language skills and those learning EAL could still benefit
from receiving an intervention aimed at improving these skills, and oral and written language
skills may help each other develop (Dockrell & Connelly, 2009). The interventions were delivered
in the children’s classroom by the class teacher at the same time each day, straight after the lunch
break. The stories took around 5–15 min to read or tell, varying slightly by story.
All stories used in the intervention came from the book The Puffin Book of Stories for Six-
Year-Olds, edited by Wendy Cooling (1996). This book consists of 14 short stories, each written
by a different author from a range of cultural backgrounds and covering a range of topics. This
book was selected for use in the interventions because the stories had all been identified as being
suitable for this age group of children, and it was hoped that the diverse stories would appeal to
children from a range of social and cultural backgrounds, minimizing any bias in children’s inter-
est in the stories or their ability to remember them.
The pretest activities consisted of the teachers reading or telling the story “The Tortoises’
Picnic” to their classes twice. We then measured participants’ oral language by asking them to
retell the story they had just heard while recording it on a voice recorder, before transcribing it.
We analyzed the transcripts of participants’ oral story retellings for fluency, by counting the total
number of words used; for vocabulary, by counting the total number of different words used; and
for key points of the story, by counting how many of the points on the teacher’s story prompt
sheet (showing the main points of each story) were included in the child’s retelling. These meas-
ures of oral language ability have been used in previous research in this area (Isbell et al., 2004).
Participants were also asked to write a retelling of the story for 15 min, and their teachers marked
these written story retellings using the Writing Assessment Measure (Dunsmuir et al., 2015). This
involved their teacher giving a score of 0–4 for each of seven criteria relating to writing ability:
handwriting, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure and grammar, vocabulary, organization and
overall structure, and ideas; 30% of these retellings were then marked again by the first author to
check interrater reliability. Participants all also completed the Early Attitudes Test–Revised
(EAT–R; Frederickson & Dunsmuir, 2001), which was used to measure their self-perception. ‘The
EAT–R is a 20-question survey of self-perception in the following areas: reading, writing, math,
peer relations, self-esteem, and global self-perception. It was devised for use with children ages
4–7 years and is a downward extension of the Burnett Self Scale (Burnett, 1999). Examples of
some items are “Can you do well at reading?” and “Do you enjoy writing?” There are indications
that the EAT–R is a reliable measure: moderate to strong Spearman’s rank correlations were
reported between the scores achieved by children on each of the EAT–R subscales the first and
second times they took the test (ranging from .46 for math and .61 for writing), which indicates
satisfactory test–retest reliability (Clarke, Savage, Sethi, & Wright, 2002). The EAT–R was admin-
istered via a website. Questions were presented by a female voice in auditory format, and four
possible answers were provided (emphatic yes, moderately stated yes, moderately stated no, and
emphatic no), each with an accompanying animated face that shook or nodded its head with the
degree of vigor indicated by the auditory tone. Participants were required to point to the image
that best matched their response to the question posed. Oral vocabulary was measured using the
Vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Fourth UK Edition
(WISC–IV; Wechsler, 2003). This involved participants being asked to define words of increasing
complexity; the first author read aloud each question to each participant individually, the
8 C. Z. WRIGHT AND S. DUNSMUIR

participant replied verbally, and the first author wrote down the participant’s answer in the
record booklet. The results of these pretest activities provided baseline data to measure the oral
and written language abilities and self-perception of the children in each condition before they
received the intervention.
At the end of the 10-week intervention, posttest activities were carried out. The teachers read
or told the story “How Trouble Made the Monkey Eat Hot Peppers,” which was similar in length
to the pretest story, twice, and the participants were then asked to write a retelling of the story
and to give an oral retelling of the story that was recorded on a voice recorder and then tran-
scribed. Participants then again completed the EAT–R. The results of these posttest activities pro-
vided data to see the children’s oral and written language abilities and self-perception after they
had received the intervention and to find out whether there was any variation among the three
intervention conditions. The Vocabulary subtest of the WISC–IV was not administered at postt-
est, as it is recommended that a gap of at least 6 months be left between each administration in
order to avoid practice effects (Wechsler, 2003).
Three months after the intervention was completed (in July 2016), follow-up assessments were
carried out. Teachers read or told the story “The Hodja and the Saucepan” twice; this story was
similar in length to, but slightly shorter than, the pretest and posttest stories. Participants were
asked to write a retelling of the story and to give a verbal retelling of the story that was recorded
on a voice recorder and then transcribed. Participants completed the EAT–R again; they also
completed the Vocabulary subtest of the WISC–IV, as it had been 6 months since the pretest
administration of it. The results of these follow-up activities provided data to evaluate whether
there had been any enduring change in the children’s oral and written language abilities and self-
perception as a result of the interventions.
This study received ethical approval. An opt-out parent consent form was sent to the parents
or carers of every child in the participating classes before the start of the intervention, and usual
research ethical guidelines were followed.

Training
Teachers were randomly allocated to intervention conditions. Prior to beginning the intervention,
participating teachers attended an hour-long training session at which they were given a manual
summarizing implementation that they could refer to throughout the intervention and the book
of stories (Cooling, 1996) to ensure standardization of delivery across all teachers. Teachers allo-
cated to the storytelling intervention condition were also given prompt sheets providing the key
elements of each story to refer to when telling the story, if necessary.
During the training session, the teachers were shown videos of a former teacher reading a
story, fulfilling the key features of both the storybook-reading intervention and the storytelling
intervention. These were two lively videos demonstrating how to read and tell the stories, high-
lighting the emphasis, animation and use of gestures, and intonation required in the storytelling
condition and contrasting this with the engaging but less animated reading of the story from the
book in the story-reading condition. These videos gave teachers a clear idea of how to deliver the
intervention they had been allocated to deliver and allowed them to ask any questions about the
delivery of the storytelling and story-reading interventions. This process encouraged consistency
in the teachers’ own story delivery as they were guided by the video demonstrations. Teachers
were consulted about whether the interventions and the pre- and posttest activities seemed feas-
ible for them to carry out, and all agreed that they were.
The teachers carried out the pretest measures during the day before the interventions began
and during the first few days of the interventions. All of the teachers were female, and they had
all been teaching for between 5 and 15 years.
 READING & WRITING QUARTERLY 9

A fidelity checklist was designed for this study to assess the delivery of the storytelling inter-
vention and the story-reading intervention in the six participating schools, as no fidelity checklists
used in similar research could be found. This checklist drew on Dane and Schneider’s (1998) and
Durlak and Dupre’s (2008) implementation dimensions—fidelity, dosage, quality, participant
responsiveness, program differentiation, monitoring of control/comparison conditions, program
reach, and adaptation—combined with Bishop et al.’s (2014) measures of fidelity. The fidelity
checks consisted of a teacher being video recorded delivering the intervention, with checklist
completion occurring while the first author viewed the video recording after the lesson had taken
place. Teachers were each observed roughly four times during the 10-week intervention across
the storytelling and story-reading conditions; in all observations teachers were found to have
adhered to all implementation dimensions outlined on the checklist, which suggests 100% fidelity
for sessions observed. As instructed, teachers in the storytelling intervention condition used the
interactive features of storytelling (regular eye contact with children, gestures and actions, charac-
ters’ voices, a range of facial expressions, and varying volume and/or pitch of voice) to a greater
extent when telling the stories (average rating ¼ 28.6 out of 36 for the use of these features) than
those in the story-reading condition (average rating ¼ 17.3 out of 36 for the use of these features).
Teachers in the intervention groups completed a short survey at the end of the intervention about
how they had found implementing it.

Results
Mixed analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted in order to compare participants’ scores
on each of the measures between the storytelling group, the story-reading group, and the com-
parison group at pretest, posttest, and follow-up and to see whether there were any significant
differences between these scores (see Table 1 for p values and Table 2 for effect sizes for each
measure). Preliminary checks were carried out to make sure that there was no violation of the
assumptions of normality and homogeneity of variance; skewness and kurtosis were within
acceptable levels for all dependent variables except the EAT–R subscales, which were all nega-
tively skewed. Tukey’s post hoc comparisons were conducted when an ANOVA showed a signifi-
cant main effect in order to identify between which groups the significant difference in scores
occurred. Bonferroni corrections were applied to protect against Type I error, which can be
increased when running multiple ANOVAs.
ANOVAs showed that there was no significant difference in oral fluency scores during oral
story retellings between the different groups at pretest, but there was a significant difference at
posttest and at follow-up: pretest, F(2, 174) ¼ 1.744, p ¼ .178; posttest, F(2, 185) ¼ 16.428,

Table 1. Results of analyses of variance showing p values for the main effects of time (pretest,
posttest and follow-up), intervention group, and the interaction between these variables.
Main effect of Time  Group
Dependent variable Main effect of time intervention group interaction
Oral fluency <.001 <.001 <.001
Oral vocabulary <.001 .001 .001
Oral key points of story <.001 .014 .199
WISC Vocabulary subtest score <.001 .164 .027
Written retellings <.001 .018 .354
EAT–R writing self-description scores .430 .376 .325
EAT–R writing self-evaluation scores .030 .558 .451
EAT–R total scores .762 .460 .135
EAT–R peer relations scores .013 .622 .328
EAT–R self-esteem scores .661 .889 .227
Note. WISC: Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Fourth UK Edition; EAT–R: Early Attitudes
Test–Revised.
p  .05.  p  .01.
10 C. Z. WRIGHT AND S. DUNSMUIR

Table 2. Results of analyses of variance showing effect sizes (gp2) for the main effects of time (pre-
test, posttest and follow-up), intervention group, and the interaction between these variables.
Main effect of Time  Group
Dependent variable Main effect of time intervention group interaction
Oral fluency .418 .129 .163
Oral vocabulary .543 .098 .099
Oral key points of story .588 .060 .022
WISC Vocabulary subtest score .105 .020 .041
Written retellings .225 .046 .013
EAT–R writing self-description scores .007 .017 .020
EAT–R writing self-evaluation scores .031 .014 .010
EAT–R total scores .002 .014 .031
EAT–R peer relations scores .039 .008 .020
EAT–R self-esteem scores .004 .002 .025
Note. WISC: Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Fourth UK Edition; EAT – R: Early Attitudes
Test–Revised.
Medium effect size (>0.06; Cohen, 1988). Large effect size (>0.14; Cohen, 1988).

p < .001; follow-up, F(2, 161) ¼ 12.493, p < .001. Post hoc comparisons showed that at posttest
there was a significant difference in oral fluency scores between the storytelling group
(M ¼ 237.18, SD ¼ 79.765) and story-reading group (M ¼ 141.05, SD ¼ 81.430; p < .001) and a sig-
nificant difference between the storytelling group (M ¼ 237.18, SD ¼ 79.765) and comparison
group (M ¼ 171.14, SD ¼ 95.715; p < .001). There was no significant difference in oral fluency
scores between the story-reading group and comparison group (p ¼ .732). At follow-up there was
a significant difference in oral fluency scores between the storytelling group (M ¼ 133.33,
SD ¼ 52.652) and story-reading group (M ¼ 87.45, SD ¼ 41.297; p < .001) and a significant differ-
ence between the storytelling group (M ¼ 133.33, SD ¼ 52.652) and comparison group (M ¼ 95.54,
SD ¼ 55.428; p ¼ .001). There was no significant difference in oral fluency scores between the
story-reading group and comparison group (p ¼ .892).
ANOVAs showed that there was no significant difference in oral vocabulary scores during oral
story retellings between the different groups at pretest, but there was a significant difference at
posttest and at follow-up: pretest, F(2, 175) ¼ 1.048, p ¼ .353; posttest, F(2, 185) ¼ 10.300,
p < .001; follow-up, F(2, 161) ¼ 15.882, p < .001. Post hoc comparisons showed that at posttest
there was a significant difference in oral vocabulary scores between the storytelling group
(M ¼ 98.94, SD ¼ 28.116) and story-reading group (M ¼ 68.82, SD ¼ 34.672; p < .001) and a sig-
nificant difference between the storytelling group (M ¼ 98.94, SD ¼ 28.116) and comparison group
(M ¼ 80.23, SD ¼ 40.642; p ¼ .002). There was no significant difference in oral vocabulary scores
between the story-reading group and comparison group (p ¼ .835). At follow-up there was a sig-
nificant difference in oral vocabulary scores between the storytelling group (M ¼ 57.34,
SD ¼ 18.134) and story-reading group (M ¼ 40.95, SD ¼ 15.040; p < .001) and a significant differ-
ence between the storytelling group (M ¼ 57.34, SD ¼ 18.134) and comparison group (M ¼ 40.94,
SD ¼ 20.796; p < .001). There was no significant difference in oral vocabulary scores between the
story-reading group and comparison group (p ¼ .890).
ANOVAs showed that there was no significant difference in WISC–IV Vocabulary subtest
scores between the different groups at pretest, but there was a significant difference in scores at
follow-up (the WISC–IV was only carried out at pretest and follow-up to avoid practice effects):
pretest, F(2, 184) ¼ 0.702, p ¼ .497; follow-up, F(2, 186) ¼ 3.535, p ¼ .031. Post hoc comparisons
showed that at follow-up there was a significant difference in WISC–IV Vocabulary subtest scores
between the story-reading group (M ¼ 9.01, SD ¼ 3.062) and comparison group (M ¼ 7.80,
SD ¼ 2.941; p ¼ .045). There was no significant difference in WISC–IV Vocabulary subtest scores
between the storytelling group and comparison group (p ¼ .883) or between the storytelling group
and story-reading group (p ¼ .110).
 READING & WRITING QUARTERLY 11

ANOVAs showed that there were no significant differences between intervention groups at
pretest, posttest, or follow-up for key points of stories included in oral retellings, written retellings
of stories scored by teachers using the Writing Assessment Measure, or any measures within
the EAT–R.
The results of the short survey completed by the six teachers in the intervention groups about
how they had found implementing the interventions showed that teachers in the storytelling con-
dition noticed improvements in children’s oral and written language skills, whereas teachers in
the story-reading condition did not notice any changes in these areas other than expected pro-
gress over time. Also, teachers in the storytelling and story-reading conditions noted similar diffi-
culties running the intervention, but teachers in the storytelling condition reported being likely to
continue using more elements of the intervention in the future than those in the story-read-
ing condition.

Discussion
Children in the storytelling group produced significantly longer oral retellings than children in
the story-reading group and comparison group; this accords with the finding of Isbell et al.’s
(2004) study that children in the storytelling group had greater mean lengths of utterances than
those in the story-reading group.
Also, the story-reading intervention group scored significantly better on the Vocabulary subtest
of the WISC–IV at posttest than the comparison group, and the storytelling group used a signifi-
cantly wider vocabulary in their oral story retellings than both of the other groups. These results
show the potential benefit of a regular story intervention of reading or telling on children’s devel-
oping vocabulary and is congruent with research showing an improvement in children’s vocabu-
lary as a result of exposure to regular storytelling (Maguire, 1985) or story reading (Baker
et al., 2013).
However, the storytelling intervention did not lead to significant improvements in children’s
written recounts of the stories they had heard. This may be due to the fact that writing is a differ-
ent medium from oral presentation, whereas oral story retelling was the same medium as the
intervention and therefore more likely to improve because of direct knowledge and skill transfer
as a result of the intervention. This is consistent with Isbell et al.’s (2004) study, which reported
that the storytelling group was better at retelling stories orally than the story-reading group, but
the story-reading group was better at creating a story using a wordless picture book than the
storytelling group—each group improved in the medium of the intervention received. Similar
findings have been reported for interventions in related areas. For example, Lonigan et al. (2013)
randomly assigned children to groups to receive either meaning-focused reading interventions
(dialogic reading or shared reading) or code-focused reading interventions (focusing on phono-
logical awareness, letter knowledge, or both) or to a control group. They found that the interven-
tions led to significant improvements in the children’s reading skills, but only in those domains
targeted by the intervention the children received (Lonigan et al., 2013). In addition, Fisher and
Frey’s (2017) study looked at middle school teachers’ use of strategies to develop the oral lan-
guage skills of students in their classes who were learning EAL. They found that the students’ lan-
guage skills improved in the specific areas that had been targeted through the teaching strategies
teachers had implemented, such as use of grammar improving after small-group needs-based
grammar instruction and reading abilities improving after teaching involving exposure to a wide
range of text types and topics (Fisher & Frey, 2017). This suggests that the medium of the inter-
vention affected which skills improved. This implies that children are most likely to learn the
skills they witnessed in others during the delivery of an intervention rather than related abilities
such as writing stories that they did not witness during the intervention. This suggests that a
story-writing intervention would be likely to lead to improvements in children’s written retellings
12 C. Z. WRIGHT AND S. DUNSMUIR

of stories, but this was not seen in the present study, as the interventions only exposed children
to story reading or storytelling.
An alternative explanation for the fact that the only significant change as a result of the inter-
vention was found in children’s oral language is that the study involved a short intervention of
only 10 weeks, and linguistic concepts acquired in oral language often take about a year or longer
to be seen in written language (Loban, 1976). This may be because children’s knowledge of oral
language contributes to and stimulates the development of their written language (Dockrell &
Connelly, 2009; Dockrell et al., 2007; Dunsmuir & Blatchford, 2004), and the writing process
involves using talk knowledge (Myhill, 2009) and is therefore partly dependent on children’s oral
language abilities. Moreover, all children who do not have any special educational needs develop
the ability to speak at least one language without any formal teaching (Crain & Lillo-Martin,
1999), whereas writing is an artificial task that requires formal teaching and takes a lot longer to
develop. This suggests that if the present intervention had lasted a year or more, the same signifi-
cant improvements seen in children’s oral language as a result of the storytelling intervention
might also have been seen in their written language and their self-description and self-evaluation
ratings of their writing abilities measured by the EAT–R because of their improved oral language
abilities leading to improvements in their written language abilities (Dockrell & Connelly, 2009).
Therefore, the findings of the present study may reinforce Dockrell and Connelly’s (2009) theory,
which provides the theoretical framework for this study, suggesting that children’s oral language
may inform their written language, so improvements in children’s written language may be seen
some time after improvements in their oral language.
In contrast, the lack of any significant differences between intervention groups on ratings of
their peer relations, self-esteem, or overall perception of their abilities at school as rated on the
EAT–R might suggest that storytelling does not impact on aspects of children’s self-perception at
school. However, this may have been due to the short-term nature of the intervention. The fact
that improvements were seen in children’s oral language may highlight the power of storytelling
to affect change in children’s oral language, whereas other changes may take longer to develop to
a measurable degree. Perhaps if a measure of enjoyment of the intervention or a measure of self-
perception in relation to children’s ability to retell or rewrite stories had been used then the
storytelling group might have scored higher than the story-reading group and comparison group,
as this would have been more directly related to the intervention than their self-perception of
other abilities at school. Alternatively, an effect might have been detected if an indirect measure
of enjoyment, such as amount of fidgeting, had been used as a possible indicator of engagement
and absorption during the delivery of the intervention. For example, Myers (1990) found that
children fidgeted less when they were told stories than when they were read stories from books;
this finding might have been replicated in the present study had fidgeting been measured.

Strengths of the current study

There are a number of strengths of this study. First, there was a low level of attrition during the
study: 209 participants were recruited for the research and 194 participants continued until the
end (a 7% attrition rate); this ensured that the intervention groups were of a good size and
remained similar in composition throughout the intervention. Second, the inclusion of a compari-
son group in this study that continued with their usual literacy practices ensured that any
improvements in measures at posttest and follow-up were not simply due to the children being
older or having learned more in other areas of school but were likely to be a direct result of the
intervention. Third, the fact that the design included a 3-month follow-up enabled us to explore
the longer term impact of the interventions and to provide further evidence of the effectiveness
of the storytelling intervention in improving children’s oral language.
 READING & WRITING QUARTERLY 13

Limitations of the current study

There are also some limitations to the present study. First, participants’ oral and written retellings
were scored in different ways. Oral retellings were scored by calculating the total number of
words used, total number of different words used, and total number of key points of the original
story included in the retelling, whereas written retellings were scored using the Writing
Assessment Measure, which is dependent on adult judgments of the quality of aspects of writing.
It was not possible in the timescale of this research to transcribe all of the children’s written story
retellings and score them in the same way as the oral story retellings. If this had been done, then
these two measures of language skills would have been more comparable and some significant
differences may have been found in children’s fluency and vocabulary in their story rewritings
between the different intervention groups as were found for the oral retellings.
Second, the participants ideally would have been randomly assigned to intervention conditions
and would have all received the intervention from the same person in order to ensure that the
groups were equally matched and that there were minimal differences in intervention delivery.
Even though fidelity checks were conducted, they were carried out on just 10% of the interven-
tion sessions delivered and may not have detected all variations in implementation.
Third, teachers in the storytelling condition were instructed to be animated and use gestures
and varied intonation while telling the stories, whereas teachers in the story-reading condition
were instructed to be engaging but less animated. This difference in instruction may have contrib-
uted to the significant difference between the two groups in children’s improved oral language. If
teachers in both conditions had been instructed to deliver the stories in exactly the same way, but
with one group reading and one group telling the stories, there may have been less difference in
children’s oral language between the story-reading and the storytelling intervention conditions.

Further research
‘As children get older, they tend to focus less on the secretarial elements of the writing process
and become more aware of compositional elements of writing. Therefore, it would be interesting
to see the effect of this storytelling intervention on the written story retellings of older children
who are more proficient at written composition, allowing them to write more and use a wider
range of words in 15 min. This older population might be more likely to show a demonstrable
impact of storytelling on written language, particularly if this is measured in the same way as the
oral story retellings were measured in the current study, by counting the number of words writ-
ten, number of different words written, and number of key points of the original story included
in the rewriting.
Moreover, all children have to learn to adapt their oral language to fit the level of formality of
their speech and the social context they are in. However, this process is often more difficult for
children who do not speak Standard English or those who are learning EAL, and their oral lan-
guage proficiency may mask difficulties with written language (Perera, 1984). Therefore, the large
EAL population in the present study may have influenced the response to the intervention on
children’s written language. Conducting the present study with children who are mostly learning
English as their first language might show larger improvements in their written story retellings
than those seen in the current study, as the children’s spoken and written language skills might
be more consistent. This would be interesting to explore, as it could suggest that this intervention
might be more effective at improving children’s written language in schools with a population of
majority native English speakers.
In addition, further research could explore in more depth the experiences of the children and
teachers during the storytelling and story-reading interventions to extend this study, which briefly
explored teachers’ views through the implementer feedback survey. For example, research could
14 C. Z. WRIGHT AND S. DUNSMUIR

look at whether children and teachers enjoy the process of implementing and receiving the inter-
vention, whether children feel more engaged when being told stories compared to being read sto-
ries from books, whether teachers and children look forward to the sessions, and whether
elements of the sessions drift into other aspects of school life (e.g., into the children’s games
and drawings).

Recommendations and implications

This study showed that telling stories to 6- and 7-year-old children led to improvements in their
oral vocabulary and oral fluency during story retellings. These findings suggest that it would be
beneficial for primary school teachers to use storytelling regularly with their classes to develop
children’s oral language, aiding in the comprehension of stories. Improved oral language skills
may also lead to children contributing more to class discussions, giving longer answers to
teachers’ questions, and experiencing greater enjoyment of and engagement with language and lit-
erature, which may reduce broader problems associated with language difficulties, such as class-
room disruption and behavioral difficulties.

Acknowledgments
We thank the 194 children and eight teachers who participated in this research from the following schools in
Westminster: Essendine Primary School, Minerva Academy, St Clement Danes C.E. Primary School, St Mary
Magdalene’s Church of England Primary School, St Peter’s Eaton Square C.E. Primary School, and St Vincent de
Paul Catholic Primary School.

References
Applebee, A. (1978). The child’s concept of story. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Archibald, J.-A. (2008). Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body and spirit. Vancouver, British
Columbia: The University of British Columbia Press.
Baker, S. K., Santoro, L. E., Chard, D. J., Fien, H., Park, Y., & Otterstedt, J. (2013). An evaluation of an explicit
read aloud intervention taught in whole-classroom formats in first grade. The Elementary School Journal, 113,
331–358. doi:10.1086/668503
Barnes, D. (1990). Oral language and learning. In S. Hynds & D. L. Rubin (Eds.), Perspectives of talking and learn-
ing (pp. 41–54). USA: National Council of Teachers of English.
Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (1982). From conversation to composition: The role of instruction in a develop-
mental process. In Glaser, R. (Ed.), Advances in instructional psychology volume 2 (pp. 1–64). Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Berninger, V. (2000). Development of language by hand and its connections to language by ear, mouth, and eye.
Topics in Language Disorders, 20, 65–84. doi:10.1097/00011363-200020040-00007
Berninger, V., Mizokawa, D., Bragg, R., Cartwright, A., & Yates, C. (1994). Intraindividual differences in levels of
written language. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 10, 259–275. doi:10.1080/1057356940100307
Bishop, D. V. M., & Clarkson, B. (2003). Written language as a window into residual language deficits: A study of
children with persistent and residual speech and language impairments. Cortex, 39, 215–237. doi:10.1016/S0010-
9452(08)70106-0
Bishop, D. C., Pankratz, M. M., Hansen, W. B., Albritton, J., Albritton, L., & Strack, J. (2014). Measuring fidelity
and adaptation: Reliability of an instrument for school-based prevention programs. Evaluation & the Health
Professions, 37, 231–257. doi:10.1177/0163278713476882
Blum, R. W. (2005). A case for school connectedness. The Adolescent Learner, 62, 16–20.
Bolin, I. (2006). Growing up in a culture of respect: Child rearing in highland Peru. Austin, Texas: The University
of Texas Press.
Bourdin, B., & Fayol, M. (2000). Is graphic activity cognitively costly? A developmental approach. Reading and
Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 13, 183–196. doi:10.1023/A:1026458102685
Brabham, E. G., & Lynch-Brown, C. (2002). Effects of teachers’ reading-aloud styles on vocabulary acquisition and
comprehension of students in the early elementary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 465–473. doi:
10.1037/0022-0663.94.3.465
 READING & WRITING QUARTERLY 15

Brett, A., Rothlein, L., & Hurley, M. (1996). Vocabulary acquisition from listening to stories and explanations of
target words. The Elementary School Journal, 96, 415–422. doi:10.1086/461836
Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Burnett, P. C. (1999). Burnett self scale (BSS). In N. Frederickson, & R. J. Camerson (Eds.), Psychology in education
portfolio (pp. 8–10). NFER-Nelson: London.
Chafe, W. L. (1982). Integration and involvement in speaking, writing, and oral literature. In D. Tannen (Ed.),
Spoken and written language: Exploring orality and literacy (pp. 35–54). Norwood, NJ: Able.
Clarke, A., Savage, R., Sethi, S., & Wright, R. (2002). Measuring young children’s self-perceptions (unpublished mas-
ter’s dissertation). University College London, London.
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cooling, W. (1996). The puffin book of stories for six-year-olds. London: Penguin Group.
Corbett, P. (2007). The bumper book of storytelling into writing. London: Clown Publishing.
Cragg, L., & Nation, K. (2006). Exploring written narrative in children with poor reading comprehension.
Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology, 26, 55–72.
Crain, S., & Lillo-Martin, D. (1999). An introduction to linguistic theory and language acquisition. US: Wiley-
Blackwell.
Cummins, J. (1991). Interdependence of first- and second-language proficiency in bilingual children. In
E. Bialystok (Ed.), Language processing in bilingual children (pp. 70–89). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Czerniewska, P. (1992). Learning about writing. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dane, A. V., & Schneider, B. H. (1998). Program integrity in primary and early secondary prevention: Are imple-
mentation effects out of control? Clinical Psychology Review, 18, 23–45. doi:10.1016/S0272-7358(97)00043-3
Department for Education. (2008). Talk for writing. Nottingham: DCSF Publications.
Dockrell, J. E., & Connelly, V. (2009). The impact of oral language skills on the production of written text British
Journal of Educational Psychology, Monograph Series II, 6, 45–62.
Dockrell, J. E., Lindsay, G., Connelly, V., & Mackie, C. (2007). Constraints in the production of written text in
children with specific language impairments. Exceptional Children, 73, 147–164. doi:10.1177/
001440290707300202
Dunsmuir, S., & Blatchford, P. (2004). Predictors of writing competence in 4- to 7-year-old children. British
Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 461–483. doi:10.1348/0007099041552323
Dunsmuir, S., Kyriacou, M., Batuwitage, S., Hinson, E., Ingram, V., & O’Sullivan, S. (2015). An evaluation of the
writing assessment measure (WAM) for children’s narrative writing. Assessing Writing, 23, 1–18. doi:10.1016/
j.asw.2014.08.001
Durlak, J. A., & DuPre, E. P. (2008). Implementation matters: A review of research on the influence of implemen-
tation on program outcomes and the factors affecting implementation. American Journal of Community
Psychology, 41, 327–350. doi:10.1007/s10464-008-9165-0
Egan, K. (1995). Narrative and learning: A voyage of implications. In H. McEwan & K. Egan (Eds.), Narrative in
teaching, learning, and research (pp. 116–125). New York: Teachers College Press.
Egan, K. (1997). The educated mind: How cognitive tools shape our understanding. Chicago, IL: Chicago University
Press.
Epstein, S.-A., & Phillips, J. (2009). Storytelling skills of children with specific language impairment. Child
Language Teaching and Therapy, 25, 285–300. doi:10.1177/0265659009339819
Farrell, C. H., & Nessell, D. D. (1982). The effects of storytelling: An ancient art for modern classrooms (Report No.
ISBN-0-936434-04-X). San Francisco, CA.
Favat, A. F. (1977). Child and tale: The origins of interest. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Fien, H., Santoro, L., Baker, S. K., Park, Y., Chard, D. J., Williams, S., & Haria, P. (2011). Enhancing teacher read
alouds with small-group vocabulary instruction for students with low vocabulary in first-grade classrooms.
School Psychology Review, 40, 307–318.
Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2017). Developing oral language skills in middle school English learners. Reading & Writing
Quarterly, 34(1), 1–18.
Flower, L. (1979). Writer-based prose: A cognitive basis for problems in writing. College English, 41, 19–37. doi:
10.2307/376357
Frederickson, N., & Dunsmuir, S. (2001). Early attitudes test (revised). London: Educational Psychology Publishing,
University College London.
Freiberg, H. J., Prokosch, N., Treister, E. S., Stein, T., & Opuni, K. A. (1989). Turning around at-risk schools
through consistency of management. Journal of Negro Education, 58, 372–382. doi:10.2307/2295670
Gallets, M. (2005). Storytelling and story reading: A Comparison of the effects on children’s memory and story
comprehension. (unpublished master’s dissertation). East Tennessee State University.
Gibb, N. (2016). The importance of storytelling. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-
importance-of-storytelling
16 C. Z. WRIGHT AND S. DUNSMUIR

Gillam, R., & Johnston, J. (1992). Spoken and written language relationships in language learning impaired and
normally achieving school-age children. Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 35, 1303–1315. doi:
10.1044/jshr.3506.1303
Hidi, S., & Hildyard, A. (1983). The comparison of oral and written productions in two discourse types. Discourse
Processes, 6, 91–105. doi:10.1080/01638538309544557
Isbell, R., Sobol, J., Lindauer, L., & Lowrance, A. (2004). The effects of storytelling and story reading on the oral
language complexity and story comprehension of young children. Early Childhood Education Journal, 32,
157–163. doi:10.1023/B:ECEJ.0000048967.94189.a3
King, K. A., Vidourek, R. A., Davis, B., & McClellan, W. (2002). Increasing self-esteem and school connectedness
through a multidimensional mentoring program. Journal of School Health, 72, 294–299. doi:10.1111/j.1746-
1561.2002.tb01336.x
Kory, J., & Breazeal, C. (2014). Storytelling with robots: Learning companions for preschool children’s language
development, presented at the 23rd IEEE international symposium on robot and human interactive communica-
tion, Edinburgh, 2014. New Jersey: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Kroskrity, P. V. (2009). Narrative reproductions: Ideologies of storytelling, authoritative words and generic regi-
mentation in the village of Tewa. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 19, 40–56. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1395.2009.
01018.x
Loban, W. (1976). Language development: Kindergarten through grade twelve (research report 18). Urbana, IL:
National Council of Teachers of English.
Lonigan, C. J., Purpura, D. J., Wilson, S. B., Walker, P. M., & Clancy-Menchetti, J. (2013). Evaluating the compo-
nents of an emergent literacy intervention for preschool children at risk for reading difficulties. Journal of
Experimental Child Psychology, 114, 111–130. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2012.08.010
Maguire, J. (1985). Creative storytelling: Choosing, inventing, and sharing tales for children. New York: The Phillip
Lief Group, Inc.
Maynard, K. L., Pullen, P. C., & Coyne, M. D. (2010). Teaching vocabulary to first-grade students through repeated
shared storybook reading: A Comparison of rich and basic instruction to incidental exposure. Literacy Research
and Instruction, 49, 209–242.
McNeely, C. A., Nonnemaker, J. M., & Blum, R. W. (2002). Promoting school connectedness: Evidence from the
national longitudinal study of adolescent health. Journal of School Health, 72, 138–146.
Mello, R. (2001). The power of storytelling: How oral narrative influences children’s relationships in classrooms.
International Journal of Education and the Arts, 2, 1–15.
Moore, W., Hammond, L., & Fetherston, T. (2014). Strengthening vocabulary for literacy: An analysis of the use of
explicit instruction techniques to improve word learning from story book read-alouds. Australian Journal of
Learning Difficulties, 19, 153–172.
Myers, P. (1990). Stories from print. Language Arts, 67, 824–831.
Myhill, D. A. (2009). From talking to writing: Linguistic development in writing. British Journal of Educational
Psychology, 2 , 27–44.
O’Donnell, R. C. (1974). Syntactic differences between speech and writing. American Speech, 49(1/2), 102–110.
Palmer, B. C., Harshbarger, S. J., & Koch, C. A. (2001). Storytelling as a constructivist model for developing lan-
guage and literacy. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 14, 199–212.
Perera, K. (1984). Children’s writing and reading: Analysing classroom language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Perera, K. (1986). Grammatical differentiation between speech and writing in children aged 8-12. In A. Wilkinson
(Ed.), The writing of writing (pp. 90–108). Milton Keynes: OUP.
Perera, K. (1987). Understanding language. Sheffield: NAAE.
Pinker, S. (2007). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. London: Harper Perennial Modern
Classics.
Polkinghorne, D. E. (1991). Narrative and self-concept. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 1, 135–153.
Pranis, K. (2001). Building justice on a foundation of democracy, caring and mutual responsibility (manuscript
held by Minnesota Department of Corrections).
Pullen, P. C., Tuckwiller, E. D., Konold, T. R., Maynard, K. L., & Coyne, M. D. (2010). A tiered intervention model
for early vocabulary instruction: The effects of tiered instruction for young students at risk for reading disability.
Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 25, 110–123.
Puranik, C., Lombardino, L., & Altman, L. (2006). Writing through retellings: An exploratory study of language
impaired and dyslexic populations. Reading and Writing, 20, 251–272.
Resnick, M. D., Harris, K. M., & Shew, M. (1997). Protecting adolescents from harm: Findings from the National
Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health. Journal of the American Medical Association, 278, 823–832.
Semel, E., Wiig, E. H., & Secord, W. A. (2003). Clinical evaluations of language fundamentals 4th edition:
Examiner’s manual. San Antonio, TX: Harcourt Assessment, Inc.
Shanahan, T. (2006). Relations among oral language, reading and writing development. In C. MacArthur, S.
Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 171–183). New York: Guilford Press.
 READING & WRITING QUARTERLY 17

Shavelson, R. J., Hubner, J. J., & Stanton, G. C. (1976). Self-concept: Validation of construct interpretations. Review
of Educational Research, 46, 407–441.
Trostle, S., & Hicks, S. J. (1998). The effects of storytelling versus story reading on comprehension and vocabulary
knowledge of British primary school children. Reading Improvement, 35, 127–136.
Wechsler, D. (2003). Wechsler intelligence scale for children – Fourth UK edition (WISC-IVuk). London: Harcourt
Assessment.