ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the contribution of Vivian Gussin Paley’s (1990, 1992) storytelling and story-acting pedagogy to young children’s growing word and print awareness and their agency in early story authoring. Whilst many scholars have asserted and documented the value of Paley’s approach for children’s oral development and narrative comprehension (e.g. Cooper, 2009; Nicolopoulou et al., 2006; Nicolopoulou et al., 2014), considerably less attention has been paid to its potential contribution to children’s early writing and their development as authors. In telling their tales to an adult, children watch as the adult scribes their spoken words and later they participate in bringing their own and others’ written tales to life through enactment. This close observation of adults’ writing, coupled with their active participation in the acting out of their peers’ stories, were salient features of children’s participation in a recent UK-based study of the approach upon which this chapter draws. In half the settings, children (aged three to six years old) initiated their own writing activities, authoring and co-authoring their own tales with friends and scribing their peers’ stories for later dramatisation (Cremin et al., 2013). The agency and intentionality shown by these young authors was marked; they seized opportunities to write their own narratives and to scribe others’ tales and in the process learnt about writing through their authorial engagement.
