Helping Children Become Better Storytellers

The child is living in the story and the world in their eyes is pure and lovely.They like all kinds of interesting stories, and like to look upon things around as a story.Storytelling can improve children’s interpersonal skills, by which children can fully express their wishes and aspirations. Moreover, it can enhance children’s emotional intelligence and help them learn sharing, empathy, caring and so on. Therefore, it is necessary to help children become better storytellers. The storytelling in this thesis refers to the substantial narrative ability. Psychologist Jerome Bruner considered that an excellent storyteller possessed a basic tool to understand the world. Narrative or storytelling is a basic way to recognize and understand the world. Through the story,people can understand things around and behaviors of others. Just like logical thinking ability, narrative ability is an important cognitive competence which needs training.So the author aims to seek a workable solution to help children become better storytellers.Based on current research backgrounds, our research adopting action research method to conduct workshops, meetings of teacher and children, and children’s performing in various forms of organization. Emphasis on combining with listen to the story, tell stories, play stories. At the same time also need teachers, parents, and children’s mutual cooperation. In such a real environment, we record children’s actual performance, and the process of activities. Then, we compared the effects of narrative ability of the children to help children become better storytellers. In this study, we choose 5-6 year-old children as research subjects. There are 60 children altogether in the experimental group and the control group. The research is divided into two stages:experimental stage and testing stage. In the experimental stage, the experimental group carried out activities for twenty times, and the control group went with normal teaching activities in non-interference state. During the testing stage, we took two ways, pictures description and free talk, evaluated by independent story telling. At last,we combined quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis on the changes before and after the test of the experimental group, as well as differences between the experimental group and the control group, focusing on detecting children’s narrative structural integrity and richness of the content.The results showed that various forms of story organization exert positive effect on promoting children’s narrative ability. Children can tell a story much completelywith the help of story structure teaching method and story maps. Strengthening logic and openness in the process of story discussion can help children tell a more plentiful story. The ability of narrating a complete story from the five elements of time, place,characters, and events can be learned for children by guiding them to grasp the structure of stories.