Book Description

Storytelling has long been a part of our culture, and teachers should recognize its value as a pedagogical tool. The Word Weaving program, an experimental storytelling program, includes folk tales, literary tales, adaptations, and original and true stories from the teller. In it, all stories are simply told to a class without a book in evidence. Because experience with Word Weaving techniques had suggested that storytelling provides several benefits to students, a study was conducted to investigate and document the effects of a full-year Word Weaving program. Subjects were two groups of 13 primary grade students, one control and one experimental. Teachers of the experimental group were trained in and used Word Weaving techniques. Identical procedures involving students retelling a story and then creating a new story based on it were used first in October then again in May. Four measures of language usage were obtained: fluency, vocabulary, descriptive language, and recall. Results indicated that although the two groups were equally fluent at first, by the end of the year, the experimental group told longer stories than they did earlier and also significantly outperformed the control group. Although the retelling data showed no significant differences between the experimental and control groups on any of the dependent variables, the experimental group did show greater gains on all the measures. Teachers also unanimously attested to storytelling's benefits. (Tables of results and suggestions for future research are included.) (JL)