Guidelines
...Fiction and reality.
We decided to focus on the process from oracy to literacy by the exercise of storytelling. That is, children listen to stories told by storytellers then retell those stories in order to improve their language skills.
Literacy
New experiences reshape the existing memory in the brain or schema, having a impact in the linguistic, cognitive, social, and emotional development of the children over time. And the growth of a child literacy is shaped by these linguistic, cognitive, social and emotional developments. “Knowledge can’t be given directly from the teacher to the learner, but must be constructed by the learner and reconstructed as new information becomes available. “
Storytelling
Storytelling is clearly a social experience with oral narrative, incorporating linguistic features that display a "sophistication that goes beyond the level of conversation" (Mallan, 1991: 14). And for this reason storytelling acts as an effective building block easing the journey from oracy to literacy. Literacy is a second order language system that requires oral competency as a prerequisite (Dyson, 1991; Hall, 1987).
Both oracy and literacy are forms of communication between human beings: in essence a social interaction.
Storytelling is distinctly a social and cultural experience and for many young children is a comfortable link between oracy and literacy.
Advantages of listening to told stories
Our written language is far more complex than our spoken language. Snow & Tabors (1993) clearly define writing as "a system of its own", that builds on the base of oracy, then grows far beyond it. Snow and Tabors have found that a well established oral language vocabulary is essential for the development of young children's written vocabulary. Children can sound out a written word more efficiently...
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