CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
What predicts African American children’s development of oral storytelling skills?
A child’s ability to produce a coherent oral narrative, or story, is a critical competency for literacy development. Research shows that children who are good storytellers are more likely to become better readers. For African American children, early competency in structuring oral narratives may be particularly consequential. Yet little is known about the developmental progression of oral narrative skills among young African American children. To address this gap, this project examines age-related differences in how African American children structure their oral narratives and the factors that predict oral narrative development.
How does storytelling happen between parents and young children?
Research finds that the home literacy environment provides a foundation for children’s early learning and is thus an important context for children’s development of emergent literacy skills. Despite evidence that children’s early oral narrative skills predict their later literacy outcomes, much of the research on home literacy environments has been focused on print exposure via shared book reading between parents and children. Oral narrative or storytelling experiences at home may be a particularly important early context of learning for parents to teach children complex oral discourse that may have implications for children’s emergent literacy development. The current study aims to explore the oral storytelling practices among a diverse group of families with young children.
What beliefs do teachers have about children’s oral narrative skills?
Research suggests that children’s oral narrative skills are important skills for helping children transition from oral language to written text. Yet, there is evidence to suggest that teachers rarely, if ever, provide instruction in oral narratives to young children. This disconnect between the research evidence of the importance of oral narrative skills for literacy development and the dearth of oral narrative instruction in school indicates the need to investigate teachers’ perceptions of children’s oral narrative skills. This study explores how teachers explain children’s development of oral narrative skills and the instructional practices they use to support children’s development of these foundational skills.
