In the article, "Assessing children's oral storytelling in their first year of school" Riley and Burrell look at the important role that storytelling plays in the classroom. Some of the benefits of oral narration in the classroom were improved reading ability, better developed writing skills, wider vocabulary, and a greater ability to use descriptive words. Also, frequently exposing children to hearing and telling stories in class can lead to higher reading comprehension when they start to read actual books.
In their study, Riley and Burrell enroll a group of 5-6 year old children in a program called "StoryTalk" which is developed to enhance the children's language skills as well as narration ability. The participants were told a story and asked to retell the same story that they just heard multiple times. Their re-telling of the story was rated in terms of overall sentence structure, vocabulary, word structure, basic concepts, and formulating labels. Researchers used two different measures to score these categories: Tell Me - New Zealand SEA Story Retelling task, and CELF.
Researchers found that children's scores in all categories went up with the second retelling of the story, although they had a few drawbacks as well. Teachers who were giving this assessment test found that it was difficult to assess the categories accurately. There would definitely have to be a training session or multiple raters to make this test more accurate. Regardless of the drawbacks, teachers found that many students who had not been excelling with normal schoolwork thrived with this assignment. Riley and Burrell (2007) wrote, "The assessment gave the children an opportunity to say more than they would normally be able to say in a group or whole-class situation" (p. 192-193).
This all goes back to the original idea that allowing children to participate in storytelling tasks in the classroom is an alternative to normal teaching techniques. Not all children learn in the same way and allowing them options will give more children a chance to excel especially in terms of language skills, written and narrative. Gaining more insight into the benefits of storytelling on things such as sentence structure and label formation could provide an alternative teaching style that ensures that no child is left behind on the road to learning.
Riley, J., & Burrell, A. (2007). Assessing children’s oral storytelling in their first year of
school. International Journal of Early Years Education, 15, 181-196.