Experience of Beauty: Valuing Emotional Engagement and Collaboration in Teacher-Child Storytelling Activities

Abstract

At the kindergarten stage, storytelling activities are a proven intervention that promotes children’s vocabulary, reading, oral expression and writing development. The purpose of this study was to examine children’s emotional engagement and cooperation during storytelling by early childhood teachers. This study adopted a qualitative research method with a sample of children (aged 5-6 years) in an inclusive K3 kindergarten in China. Data were collected through video recordings of storytelling activities. Conversation Analysis (CA) and Multimodal Interaction Analysis (MIA) were used as analytical tools for teacher-child emotional engagement and collaboration in storytelling activities. The study focuses on the entertaining nature of teachers’ storytelling organisation, storytelling teaching styles and children’s participation (verbal and non-verbal). The study found that teachers used body language, props and vocal tones to stimulate children’s emotional engagement and cooperation. Children demonstrated their understanding of the story by actively answering questions, catering to body movements, choral singing and creating story segments to achieve co-participation. The data from this study form initial insights into the deepening of children’s aesthetic literacy and socialisation through storytelling activities. This research can further prompt teachers to focus on diversity in the organisation of storytelling activities, as well as help children to immerse themselves in early literacy through their emotional appraisal of story events or characters.