Read more about the benefits of storytelling
| Site: | Isotis |
| Course: | Promoting multilingualism in the family |
| Book: | Read more about the benefits of storytelling |
| Printed by: | Guest user |
| Date: | Sunday, 23 February 2025, 3:44 AM |
1. Benefits of storytelling
Storytelling is a complex ability that involves cognitive and linguistic skills to structure and narrate a storyline. The storytelling activities help children to improve their oral language skills and support their literacy development.
Storytelling activities in early childhood supports vocabulary acquisition, language complexity, communicative competence and comprehension. The oral language activities at home can be more beneficial for vocabulary development of bilingual children than literacy activities.
Storytelling also provide psychosocial benefits for children. While bolstering curiosity, exploration of ideas, imagination, critical thinking skills and problem-solving, it also contributes to children making meaning of their personal experiences.
2. Aims
The aims pursued within this approach concern:
- Building on available resources and skills of the family (stories of the heritage culture, stories of the native country, childhood stories of the parents)
- Supporting the development of language skills of children
- Bolstering child’s personality development by nurturing skills such as creativity, imagination and sympathy
- Supporting identity development by raising cultural awareness for multicultural children.
- Strengthening the parent-child attachment by building a social and cultural bridge between them.
3. Storytelling as a culturally available product
Storytelling is an important asset of child-rearing practices in many cultures such as Hispanic families in the United States. In fact, the families from non-Western societies tend to use storytelling as a source to entertain and educate their children rather than literacy activities such as book reading like in the Western societies.
Furthermore, storytelling is a free source that is available to families regardless of their financial resources. It has been a cultural source for various societies over centuries through myths, fables and historic stories.
In our work with the Turkish-speaking families we found that the parents from various educational and financial backgrounds reported the use of storytelling as an activity with their children. Furthermore, the parents who endorse and value their cultural identity tend to practice more storytelling with their children.
