ABSTRACT
It has already been established that the need to tell stories is a part of our basic humanity, that the ‘readiness or predisposition to organise experience into a narrative form’ (Bruner, 1990, p.45) is ‘an essential component of our humanness’ (H. Rosen, 1985, p.24). Storytelling, or the ability to create, recreate and enjoy many different types of story is not the preserve of the very old or the very young, but is equally important to the ambitious politician, the student, the housewife, the factory worker, and, of course, the modern teenager. Richard Bauman calls oral storytelling ‘one of the most fondamental and potent foundations of our existence as social beings’ (Bauman, 1986, p. 114). We are all storytellers and carry with us a fair number of stories in our portable, cerebral repertoire, simply waiting for the right context to arrive to enable them to be told. However, not all of us tell traditional wonder tales. Likewise, we don’t all know local legends in any great detail. We can’t all remember jokes, let alone tell them effectively. Furthermore, even if we do have a large repertoire of these stories, we can’t always rely on having the opportunity to tell them.
