ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies four general types of drama-based interventions designed to promote young children's narrative development: play-training interventions, writing-improvement interventions, Paley-paradigm interventions and readers-theatre interventions. These diverse interdisciplinary interventions were designed to foster a variety of narrative outcomes, such as the production, comprehension and/or recall of either oral or written narratives. Children's language development and narrative skills, such as storytelling and story comprehension, have been linked to scholastic success. Many of the early studies of the effect of drama on language development were designed to investigate whether engaging in the language-rich environment and linguistic interactions of dramatic play could increase the sophistication of young children's language skills. The chapter discusses the merits and challenges of the research on drama-based narrative interventions, and the potential these interventions hold for supporting young children's acquisition of narrative skills and influencing early childhood education curricula.
