Tell Me a Story! Enhancing Literacy Through the Techniques of Storytelling

Reviewed By: Julie Dykes

REVIEW

This article advocates the use of storytelling in the classroom as an aid to language development for students with semantic language weaknesses. Acknowledging its power to imbed and further expand language skills, Cherry-Cruz points out that storytelling develops listening skills, enhances verbal expression, stimulates the imagination and verbal reasoning, and increases comprehension.

For students with weak language skills, storytelling is a vehicle to aid in phonemic development, cultural socialization, and vocabulary extension. Exposure to the sound and rhythm of language are helpful as well. Besides the language benefits, storytelling teaches life lessons, cultural acceptance, and history. Telling stories takes little equipment but produces much in the way of learning. It "creates opportunities for developing and strengthening skills in the language areas of semantics, syntax, morphology, articulation, phonology, pragmatics, reading, and writing.

Students benefit from storytelling when they listen to stories and when they retell them. In repeating a story students use recall, express ideas using vocabulary from the story, and paraphrase--find synonyms. All this expands their ability to express themselves and acquaints student with story form.

Cherry-Cruz also reports on a collaborative team-teaching project with a classroom teacher in a self-contained special education class with a primary exceptionality of language disorders. Storytelling was chosen as the methods of improving social behavior and language skills. On the topic of student fights, class members related their ideas and feelings to the classroom teacher who wrote them down. Topic-related vocabulary words were studied, feeling and action words divided, weekly activities devised to help develop sentences, and a narrative prepared from those sentences. The students eagerly shared their story with others in print, in story, and in a puppet show.

In short, storytelling techniques embody everything to which a SLP is committed and provide a natural way to develop speech and language skills. While not an in-depth discussion of the benefits, this article could be seen as advocacy. Teresa Cherry-Cruz is a Speech-language Pathologist in the Stamford Connecticut Public Schools. ASHA is the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the ASHA Leader Online is its professional online magazine. Some sponsorship is accepted: Subaru and Delmar Healthcare/Thompson Learning both have links advertising their sponsorship of the 2002 ASHA Convention. Primarily, the journal seems to be the newsletter for the association, and, while a specific date is not given, mention is made that signup for feedback on a policy document is August 2, 2002, and the publication copyright dates are given as 1997-2002.