The Use of Traditional Storytelling in Education to the Learning of Literacy Skills

Abstract

This paper focuses on the potential contribution of storytelling to education. It examines theoretical frameworks used to contextualise storytelling in formal education. The aim of the review was to identify a range of answers relating to the question: What does storytelling offer to the formal education of primary age children? Five major kinds of contributions, identified in the review of relevant literature, are discussed. They reflect the present state of knowledge about storytelling in education and the aspects which major theorists consider to be important. I have tried to explicate the links between the themes, and to discuss interrelated aspects of the use of storytelling in schools by educationists and storytellers. The first section begins by analysing the relationship of storytelling to other language and expressive arts: writing, talking, reading and drawing.The second section considers thinking and feeling, and the contribution of storytelling to the inner world of affect. The focus moves in the third section to autobiography, and in the fourth to narrative, two areas of human experience in which the human need to story as a way of making sense of that experience is a crucial factor. After exploring the implications of these essentially subjective personal aspects of storytelling for education, the fifth and final section considers some aspects of culture which are affected by the processes of storytelling in education.