Enhantment in storytelling: Co-operation and participation in children’s aesthetic experience

In kindergarten, storytelling has traditionally been seen as a learning activity that lays the groundwork for children’s vocabulary and literacy development. However, another aspect of stories has been brought to light, namely their potential to promote children’s socio-emotional learning and socialisation. The aesthetic characteristics and developmental advantages of stories are highlighted as being key to such learning. This study focuses on young children’s emotional involvement and aesthetic experiences when listening to stories read by adults. Research question: how is narrative performance accomplished through carefully coordinated actions involving several participants?

The results show that teachers used ‘lighthouse’ gaze, props, marked prosody and pauses to invite the child audience to participate. The young children exploited the recognisability of the story and contributed by co-participating through bodily repetitions, choral completions, elaborating or volunteering anticipatory contributions, and preempting the upcoming story segment. The study suggests that through adult-child co-operation, the embodied storytelling becomes a site for children’s affective and aesthetic literacy socialisation in kindergarten.

This study has used video recordings of storytelling sessions to investigate young children’s emotional involvement and aesthetic experiences of listening to stories. The children involved were between the ages of 1.5 and 3.5 years old. The data consisted of 20 hours of video recordings of 30 children and five adults. The researchers performed qualitative analyses of ten of the recordings of children sitting and listening to an adult read a story out loud to them. Focus was placed on the kindergarten teachers’ ways of organising an entertaining, engrossing, affectively valorized storytelling event, and the child audience’s verbal and nonverbal participation in the aesthetic activity.

Cekaite, A. & Björk-Willén, P. (2018). «Enhantment in storytelling: Co-operation and participation in children’s aesthetic experience». Linguistics and Education, 48:52-60.