ABSTRACT

This chapter relates a story that indicates the excitement to be generated for a child by oral storymaking. Oral storymaking offers a child immense possibilities to become a significant meaning-maker. It does so all the more powerfully because it intertwines cognition with affect. However, it is crucial for teachers to understand children like Zohra's first steps into story-telling if they are to facilitate their learning of a new language in school. The chapter first look at ways in which Zohra begins to enter a new world using story telling as a mediator, and then goes on to examine implications for teachers working in multilingual classrooms. The management of oral storymaking in a busy classroom may be demanding but opportunities need to be provided. It is particularly useful to collect a corpus of stories and to try to analyse what the child is doing, relating this also to the teacher's responses and to the kinds of story they customarily offer.