ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to examine the significance of children's engagement in stories and storytelling, to explore support strategies for the teller, the tale and the told and to highlight the contribution that oral storytelling can make to learning in language and literacy. Young children's conception of story, and how to tell a story is not only based upon the stories they have heard but also on the games they have played, the countless conversations they have taken part in, and the TV and video they have watched. Through hearing stories and telling tales, their awareness of story, character and plot is gradually expanded into aspects of linguistic style, use of narrative technique and the syntax necessary for complex thinking. Storytelling offers children the chance to take 'long turns' in the classroom, to be listened to and given the creative space to develop their communicative competence.
