Teaching Children Literature

Paper Summary:

This paper develops a perspective on the structural and reader response approaches to literature appreciation that is based upon empirical findings observed in research into the influence of storytelling on child development. To this end, this report first reviews the literature on how storytelling can influence the social, cognitive, and psycho-emotional development of children as well as its basic influence on learning. This examination of the effects of storytelling on child development is followed by an explication of both the structural and the reader response approaches to teaching literature appreciation. Based on the review of all of this material, the report discusses each theory in terms of the support or lack of support offered for it by the storytelling-child development literature. Where relevant, this discussion is used to modify, hone and refine theory into a new model of instruction (The Integrated Model) in literature appreciation, a model that focuses on storytelling as a mode of instruction and that incorporates elements and postulates of both the reader response model and the structural model.

From the Paper:

"Effects of Storytelling on Social Development. There is a good bit of literature that supports the notion that storytelling can strongly contribute to both very young and older children's social and psychosocial development. For example, Pellowski (1990) reports that research has shown that stories inform children about the lives, the dreams, the hopes, the problems, the tensions and the conflicts of diverse social and ethnic groups. In this way, storytelling helps familiarize children with how groups of people, some of them which may be very different than the group children were raised in, perceive life and its events.

Simultaneously, while informing of group differences, storytelling serves the function of maintaining a sense of the human community by telling the story using universal themes common to all. In other words, storytelling operates to broaden children's view of the world and the diverse societies it while also emphasizing the social ties that bind communities and groups of people together."

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