Teaching experiences

          I'm sitting with the grade 4-5 children, gathered into the story, and carried by the voice of their teacher. She's reading to us. We've been following Roger for two weeks. Now he is in a dank room, a dungeon. He is locked in a cage inside the room. He is without clothes or decent food and has come to the end of a bewildering journey as a boy. Our time with Roger has criss-crossed nightmare and hilarity, adventure and still points. Children's rapt faces focus somewhere beyond Linda, their teacher, who is reading about the "ravening Monster of the Sewers" (Pullman 2000:154). Their expressions reveal listening perches: Leon is grinning with delight and Zara is frowning about the wrongness of everything. Linda is reading:
Roger was sitting on the floor of his cage counting his toes when the door of the room opened and someone came in. He didn't look up; they were all the same, except that some of them were worse" (155).
"Oh!" Says Linda, "I'll stop there, there's not enough time to finish this last chapter." Unmoved by the clamour of protest and disappointment, she closes the book and the classroom collapses into quite a different set of movements and talk.
          This is a common experience in school. The "spell of a story" is broken as teachers interrupt it to point out text, ask questions, attend other business or assign a writing practice. In this, the story experience feels oddly breached in the shift of focus. There is a sense of deflation, or even conflict. In my teaching experiences spanning two decades, I suspected this "disappointment" was more complicated than the experience of a pleasure finished. There were times of uneasiness in my uses of stories for reading and writing exercises. Although my teaching included reading response work, book clubs and discussion groups, I continued to experience a nagging concern about the relationship between story experiences and teaching purposes. This "concern" is part of what led to my current research in a Grade 4-5 classroom with their teacher, Ms. Linda Stender, to learn more about the relationships between storytelling and learning. This paper is part of that study.
           The experience of being inside a story is familiar and common. In a story engagement at a desk, talking in company, or just lying somewhere comfortably, we leave the present place to join company and landscapes far beyond the place from where we listen. At the end of "being there" we come back, oddly soaked with the story, struggling a little to rejoin the present. Variations of this experience are formed by the story's medium: a book, movie, teller or tape. But a feeling of being somewhere else and "here" at the same time, that particular sort of absorption, is similar across media. A story engagement is an imaginative, pleasurable, language experience particular to itself.
In school we use story experiences to teach reading and writing. As many research studies demonstrate, there are very good reasons for this (Fisher, Flood & Lapp 1999; Snow & Ninio 1986; Sulzby & Teale 1983, 1991; Sulzby, 1985). A solid causal relationship and corollary are established. It aids social language development and vocabulary growth. It establishes a relationship of print with oral language. It creates print awareness, such as directionality, book handling and functions. It provides the material for print literacy learning. Importantly, reading storybooks aloud nourishes and instills a positive readiness for reading books. Storybook uses are strongly motivational activities for print literacy. Research and experience agree: using storybooks to prepare children for reading and writing is a strategy for achievement.
This relationship makes storybook reading aloud a front line strategy to encourage emergent print literacy. For example, in literacy programs designed for at-risk new readers, storybook availability is emphasized. Interventionist programs like Babies and Books,(2) ABC Canada(3) and Head Start (Whitehurst & Fishel, 2001) urge caregivers to read stories with their children. Many of these programs respond to studies that link performance with socio-economic aspects of a child's home life (White, 1982). They identify a critical difference between successful and struggling readers as the availability of storybooks and frequency of read-aloud time (Harris & Smith 1987). Educators urge caregivers to develop children's successful reading and writing abilities by regularly reading with them (Anderson, 1999; Copeland & Edwards 1991; Mason & Allen 1986; Smith, 1989).
          The effective, stimulating aspects of reading stories aloud are plain. Although gaps of explanation remain about the particulars of the relationship between reading storybooks and print literacy abilities, a positive causal relationship between reading aloud and emergent literacy stands:
While additional research is needed to identify factors on the causal chain, a reasonable conjecture is that story reading at home makes important, if not necessary contributions to later reading achievement (Mason & Allen, 1986:29).
          Yet, I found my "concern" about the specifics of the relationship echoed in the margins of studies of storybook reading aloud for literacy abilities. I read a hesitation, a sense of something elusive in the relationship. For instance, in a study of storybook reading strategies with young children, Scarborough and Dobrich conclude their review of research spanning 1960-1993 by saying:
Is there an association between reading to preschool children and the development of language and literacy skills? Having reviewed the results pertaining most directly to that question, we would respond in the affirmative...[but] the association is probably not as strong and consistent as it is generally supposed...The particulars of the relationship between reading aloud and literacy remains unclear (Scarborough & Dobrich 1994:285; italics mine).